#harbor

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.

Apparently the teacher who trained him said he wasn't much good with people, so he got steered toward outdoor scenes instead — and it stuck. Harbor scenes like this one, all soft grey tones, became something of a specialty for a while.

Apparently this reworks the same crowd and shoreline from a painting he'd made the year before, and he returned to these same faces again in prints a couple years later. It was one piece in a much bigger series he kept adding to for decades, loosely tracking stages of a life.