#boats

From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.

The Dutch painters of this moment get filed under Amsterdam Impressionism, which sounds a lot sunnier than what they actually put on canvas: sleet, back canals, half-built streets. They say the point was the city on an ordinary bad day rather than the postcard version.

According to what I've read, he'd left America for Paris and stayed for good — supposedly he said he couldn't fight prejudice and paint at the same time. This was apparently a view close to where he lived, done small.

Ports were his element — he sailed properly, owned a run of boats and painted his way round the Mediterranean coast. The dots were a theory at the time, as I understand it: set pure colours next to each other and let your eye do the mixing instead of muddying them on the palette.