(Updated February 2018) View of an largely empty furnace room with two vats cold and out of use to the left, a single fireplace to the right, and a frame for setting up the filters for straining liquid combustible mix (as in PAI7701) to the rear. In the centre, two men with wooden paddles stir a small quantity of mix in a metal two-handled container while at right another heats a similar one raised on bricks over a small fire in the single fireplace. The Royal Laboratory at Woolwich was constructed in 1696 for the purpose of manufacturing munitions and became centre of a larger site, formally renamed the Royal Arsenal in 1805.This drawing is one of 11 of which the numbers are non-sequential owing to the different boxes in which they are stored (by mount size): PAG9664, PAH4071-72, PAI0744-46, PAI7701-03, PAJ2303 and PAJ2312. Four (including this one) were reproduced as a double-page spread in the 'Illustrated London News' of 1 January 1916, pp.14-15, as having recently appeared at auction by Messrs Hodgsons' and been bought by the ILN for that purpose. This makes it likely that they were later given to the NMM by Sir Bruce Ingram, managing proprietor and editor of the ILN and an early supporter of the Museum. They have been attributed to Gamaliel Massiot, an obscure artist of probably Huguenot French ancestry who was drawing master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich from 1744 to 1768, after which he continued in a secondary position under Paul Sandby to shortly before his death early in 1782 (see further notes to PAI0746).