Greaves painted the banks of the Thames around Chelsea many times, including in an earlier painting of Battersea Reach now in the Tate Gallery Collection (N05216, currently in their Walk Through British Art), which shows the steeple of St Mary’s Church, Battersea.

Greaves lived on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea for most of his life and his family had a boatyard on the north side. The area provided a source of inspiration for Greaves and his friend and teacher James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In the 19th century, this stretch of the waterfront was busy with barges and steamboats and Whistler preferred the calm of the river at night to the noise and bustle of the Thames by day. He and the Greaves brothers would set off at twilight and sometimes remain on the river all night, sketching and memorising the scenes to work into paint his studio.

Greaves said ‘Chelsea was so beautiful that you couldn’t but paint it. To Mr Whistler, a boat was always a tone. To me, it was just a boat’.