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.

Focusing on ships and silos, with little sign of human life, this scene is about the machinery of war. The grey tonality and smoke-filled sky convey an ominous atmosphere, the ‘calm before the storm’ of embarking on another perilous journey across the U-boat infested Atlantic. In the right foreground, the reflection in the water gives a sense of how the dazzle patterns confused enemy ships at sea.