'Empire Creek', a coaster, was put on a slip for overhaul at Fowey, in October 1944. Her name, painted on her side, indicates that she took part in the Normandy landings. The drawing is signed in the lower right corner and inscribed by the artist on the back of the sheet 'Ministry of War Transport vessels/in dry dock at Fowey, Cornwall,/ John Piper'.
John Piper was first commissioned on short-term contracts by the War Artists' Advisory Committee in 1940, to record bomb damages on British soil. In July 1944, he replaced John Platt as official war artist for the Ministry of War Transport, to visit the Bristol Channel ports and produce work 'concentrating on coastwise shipping, loading of unusual cargos'. While early in his career, Piper mixed with the avant-garde in Paris in London, in the late 1930s he abandoned abstract art for a neo-romantic portrayal of buildings and landscape. This Cornish scene is characteristic of this later style, with subdued colours and a sombre mood that befit wartime subjects.