John Worsley joined the Royal Navy in 1939. His depictions of life on board ship were soon acquired by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), and he was quickly made an official war artist. In 1943, he was captured in the Mediterranean and spent the rest of the war in a naval officer's prison camp, Marlag ‘O’ at Westertimke, near Bremen in north Germany.
If his drawings made in captivity remained mostly optimistic and showed a ‘make-do-and-mend’, stiff-upper-lip temperament, Worsley sometimes represented the grim side of life in captivity. As PoWs, the men were reasonably well-treated, thanks in part to the vigilance of the Red Cross. But wartime privations also resulted in illness and even death, evoked in this melancholy watercolour of the camp’s cemetery