Collet's subjects included portraiture, still life and landscape. In 1950 she exhibited her recent paintings (in oil, gouache and watercolour) and drawings (in pen and in crayon) in a joint show with husband and wife painters Julius Rosenbaum and Adele Reifenberg at the Ben Uri. In May 1970, the critic of the Art Chronicle observed of her later Ben Uri exhibition: 'Ruth Collet paints the small unsensational events of human life such as women talking in a park or an old man going to sleep on another’s shoulder'.

In this domestic outdoor scene, the artist focuses on the minutae of everyday life: the framed head of a woman peering out of a back window, set against a back drop of slate roofs and red brick walls, two sets of low-slung washing strung along adjoining back yards mirroring one another. The whole, captured in a bold palette, using dry paint energetically applied, suggests a breezy spring day.