A painting showing the Thames shoreline at Greenwich, looking up-river from the east towards London from a point occupied after 1906 by the buildings of Greenwich Power Station. Also visible is the clock tower of the Trinity Hospital almshouse founded by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, in 1613. Further along are the Queen Anne and King Charles Courts of the Royal Naval College, which in 1873 took over the disused buildings of the Greenwich Royal Hospital for Seamen.

There were at least two regular ferries across the River Thames between the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich before the Greenwich Foot Tunnel was built in 1902. A horse ferry ran from near the town centre (in the far distance in this painting) and a passenger ferry to the east of Greenwich Hospital. The one in this painting is the eastern one, the vessel itself apparently being the large oared boat drawn up on the left at low tide, under the river wall of Crowley's Wharf, with figures working round its stern. The small brazier fire beyond suggests other craft are being caulked on the foreshore towards the old buildings of Highbridge and Moss's Wharf (between Crane Street and the river), also taking the opportunity of the low tide. The ship with a single topsail hoisted may be a naval training vessel connected with the College, which would probably date the painting, at earliest, to the 1880s. A ketch-rigged swimhead Thames barge lies broadside-to in the river to its right and the conditions are clearly very calm.

The artist’s depiction of the Greenwich waterfront as it appeared in the late 19th century is sombre in palette and has a sense of unrealistic stillness. The figures on the shoreline appear huddled as if against the winter cold, which the brazier emphasizes.

Hunt (1855-1922) was an accomplished expatriate American landscape and genre painter, born in Weymouth, Massachusetts. In England he lived first in Surrey and London, later at Tangier in Morocco, then St Ives, Cornwall and later in Sussex. He exhibited widely, including at at the Paris Salon in 1888, at the Royal Academy, London, the Goupil Gallery, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art and the Royal Society of British Artists, of which he was a member.