Smythe, a painter of landscape and rustic genre, was the stepbrother of the marine painter William Lionel Wyllie and was twelve years his senior. This is a watercolour version of the painting 'A thick night off the Goodwins' exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869, the subject suggested by an article in 'Household Words'. Smythe made studies in the cabin of a schooner moored at the Surrey Commercial Docks and Wyllie helped with the composition. A sloping platform was constructed in the back parlour of the family's house in Gloucester Crescent near Regent's Park, and the artists took turns sitting to each other.
The Goodwin Sands are a series of treacherous shoals and sandbars off the east coast of Kent. The watercolour is signed.