Gloucester Wharf

Stuart Davis’s Gloucester Wharf cleverly transforms an everyday harbor scene along the Massachusetts coast into a vibrant puzzle of color blocks and nautical motifs. Davis visited Gloucester every year from 1915 to 1934, continually inspired by the area’s piers, schooners, landscapes and architecture. Wandering around the familiar rocks and docks, Davis drew in his sketchbook daily scenes that caught his eye. He would then combine multiple such studies into a single painting composition, abandoning typical perspective and representative color. Over the years, his depictions became less realistic and more stylized, developing into his boldly abstracted Gloucester interpretations of the 1930s, such as the present work. As noted by Lowery Stokes Sims, his best works from this period like Gloucester Wharf "demonstrate Davis' working method of balancing the dynamics of recognizable phenomena with the will to engage a modernist vocabulary of his own." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 224)