During the First World War, John Everett was at first unable to sketch outdoors due to wartime security regulations, but in the spring of 1918, the Ministry of Information asked him to depict London river scenes. Everett received a permit to draw, and that summer, spent every day at the docks.
What attracted him most were the ships covered in ‘dazzle painting’. Dazzle was a type of camouflage developed by the artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917, in response to the heavy losses sustained by British merchant ships to German U-boat submarines. Everett’s dazzle pictures are among his most daring works for their sense of composition and modernity. They were first displayed at the Goupil Gallery in London in November 1918.

Everett primarily drew and painted sailing ships, often focusing on the rhythmic designs of sail patterns. While his wartime depictions of dazzle-painted steam ships concentrate on vessels at the height of modernity, they share this sense of composition and rhythm. With this vibrant pastel drawing of a merchantman, Everett explores form and colour. It is in a modernist style not unlike that of the Vorticists, a group of British artists who favoured a geometric approach tending towards abstraction.