These three friezes of figures are all broadly classical, including many embodying such subjects as architecture, the arts, mathematics, navigation, geography, astronomy, and carrying emblems appropriate to those topics. The NMM has two very similar drawings of this topic, the other being PAH3345.

In an 1714 account of the scheme, the critic Richard Steele recorded that the Lord Mayor of London and merchant financier Sir James Bateman was the first to propose that the hall of Greenwich Hospital should be painted. In this trio of drawings for the staffage of the Lower Hall balconies, Thornhill acknowledges Bateman's role by using him as the personification of Merchandise (along with Chrisopher Wren as Surveying, Nicholas Hawksmoor as Architecture and himself as painting). The other figure combinations comprise a range of classical figures, and those representative of geometry, mathematics, navigation, commerce, architecture, and astronomy. Some of these figures were used in the final scheme. Cosmography with her crown of stars, for example, appears on the west balcony as executed. An important source for such stock figures was Cesare Ripa's 'Iconologia'. An English translation, with etchings by Isaac Fuller the Younger, was published as Thornhill began work on the Lower Hall.

The now acidified sheet contains three studies of alternatives for the staffage of the painted end 'parapets' in the ceiling of the Painted Hall, none as finally executed but with elements that appear there in different forms. The top two rows are firmly classical with a sky background indicated. The bottom one is a modern-dress variant, spaced with four sets of double pillars and more detail of the balcony-front added.

Fairly obvious emblematic figures in the top two rows are as follows. Top, left to right: second from left, Prudence or possibly Fortune, with a winged head, a mirror and a bag of money; possibly Time with a scythe over his shoulder; figures representative of geometry, mathematics or navigation, merchants with bales, architecture, figures representing astronomy and geography. Middle: navigation, geometry and architecture, astronomy and painting. The bottom row has artists talking to bewigged gentlemen left, scientists or scholars consulting books towards the centre and further painters on the right.

The 1893 catalogue of the Royal Naval Museum in the Painted Hall states that this and a similar design (PAH3345) were then on display, given by the Revd. M. T. Cox of Badby, Northants. It is likely this is also one of the 5 drawings that were listed as on display in the 1876 catalogue.