A pencil, pen and ink and watercolour drawing of the view from the back of houses, looking out into a yard with a coal shelter and bushes, and a view towards roofs and chimney stacks. A woman leaning out of a window on the right. The sheet circumscribed with a black ink border, mounted on a wash-line bordered mount, trimmed down.

In August 1768, Sandby was appointed by the Board of Ordnance as Chief Drawing Master at the Woolwich Military Academy, a two-day-a-week position he retained until 1796. He rented lodgings in the nearby village of Old Charlton, from where this drawing was made looking out of one of his back windows. The woman is possibly Sandby's wife, Anne. Sandby exhibited two views of 'Charlton in Kent' at the Royal Academy in 1770, and several others subsequently. The informality of the subject suggests a drawing that was captured in his leisure time; Thomas Sandby was similarly drawn to the view from the back of Old Slaughter's Coffeehouse on St Martin's Lane in a drawing with Lowell Libson in 2019. 

The drawing probably dates to the earlier part of Sandby's Woolwich teaching career, based on the fashions of the girl and the similarity of the sheet in treatment to another drawing in the Royal Collection (RCIN 914561), also upright, an unusual format for Sandby. Both drawings appeared in the same lot at Paul Sandby's estate sale and appear to have been acquired together.