A painting of the Royal Docks in east London. They comprised three docks, the Royal Albert Dock, Royal Victoria Dock and the King George V Dock. They were completed between 1855 and 1921 on riverside marshes in the London borough of Newham. Although these docks suffered severe damage from German bombing in World War II, they recovered after the war but then suffered a steady decline from the 1960s onwards, following the introduction of containerization.

Large cranes on the right and left frame the painting which focuses less on a conventional horizon, than on the different types of shipping that would have frequented the Docks during the late '50s and early '60s. Blue tones unify both sky and river and change from the vivid blue of the sky to the more watery tone of the river. This is broken up by the shapes created by the dark forms of the cranes and ships. The artist has also used red and white and occasionally yellow ochre to provide the detail of the shipping and their reflections in the water. The artist has applied the paint in loose brush strokes and allowed the canvas beneath to show through, rather than concentrating on fine detail and delineation to create his overall impression.

The artist was born at Newbottle, near Sunderland, in 1920. He studied at Sunderland College of Art and King's College, Newcastle (Durham University) becoming interested in shipping subjects as a major concern in that area. Living in London from around 1950 to 1960 he had a permit from the PLA to sketch regularly in the London Docks, and they became a regular subject: he has written that ‘I did not realise then that I was painting the end of that part of the Port of London’. He subsequently moved to Buckinghamshire and began to concentrate more on landscape subjects, though with occasional returns to paint shipping at Newcastle and Sunderland, and today (2014) he lives in Yorkshire: there is another painting by him of 'Millwall Dock' (c. 1956) in the Museum of London Docklands, and one of yachts in the University of Birmingham collection. This painting is labelled on the reverse 'The Royal Docks: Summer', suggesting that it was the painting of this title which Johnson exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1965.