Stuart Davis’s affection for Gloucester was life-long. He summered there nearly every year from 1915 through the mid-1930s. It was “the place I had been looking for,” he remembered. “I wandered over the rocks, moors, and docks, with a sketching easel, large canvases, and a pack on my back, looking for things to paint." [1] He soon found this equipment cumbersome and began noting paintable subjects on the pages of small sketchbooks. He then used those sketches to create finished pictures in the studio. Davis painted his share of Gloucester’s rocks and moors, to be sure. But unlike most artists working in Gloucester in those years, he did not pursue the picturesque, but rather gravitated to the gas pumps, derricks, and factories of this busy working town.

Gloucester remained on Davis’s mind even after he stopped summering there. He used his sketchbooks as reference works, returning again and again to motifs and compositions that he found stimulating, and then reshaping them into entirely new images. In a sketchbook from 1932, for example, he made an ink drawing of Gloucester Harbor that included the “Wonson Paint” factory, a smokestack, a ship’s funnel, and pennants flying from other boats. [2] This drawing led to a large gouache (1932; private collection) and then, more than twenty years later, to another gouache, Gloucester Sunset, whose romantic title belies its inspiration in Gloucester’s gritty harbor.

In both gouaches, Davis retained elements from the original drawing, notably the polygonal shape of the composition and the striped chimney of the paint factory at left. But he modified other elements to generate an increasingly abstract design from a descriptive image. The inscription on the factory roof evolves from an identifying title (“Wonson Paint”) to a more general, rather ambiguous label (“1863 Paint”) and finally becomes one of Davis’s characteristic linear squiggles. A pile of gravel at left morphs into a cut-out-simulating dotted element that recalls similar forms in Davis’s Synthetic Cubist pictures from the 1920s on. Pennants become wedges of flat color, detached from any perceptible mast or flagpole. The spew of smoke from the stack—one of a few amorphous forms in a confederation of otherwise geometric shapes—becomes floating, cloud-like. It is a scribble of lines in the sketch, a skein of black curlicues in the 1932 gouache, and finally a softly modeled wisp of blue and white. The textural contrast between the wisp and the flat color shapes underscores the playful tension between references to the real world and the two-dimensional nature of the picture surface. Davis wanted his viewers to remember that, whatever associations they may have with his subject, however serenely the red sun appears to float above the harbor, Gloucester Sunset is paint on paper.

Gloucester Sunset was one of a handful of small gouaches that Davis made in the mid-1950s, when he was otherwise focused on large-scale works. These included oils (some of which were rooted in his memories of Gloucester [4]) and huge mural projects, among them Allée (1955; Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa). [5] Gloucester Sunset shares with the murals and some of the oils a red, white, blue, and black palette. It was praised for being “colorful” in the New York Times critic’s review of the show at the Downtown Gallery in which it first appeared. [6] Though intimate in scale and delicate in handling, it is no less engaging than his large-scale works of the time and serves as a tribute to the visual energy he would always draw from Gloucester.

—Carol Troyen

[1]  Stuart Davis, Stuart Davis (New York: American Artists’ Group, 1945), as quoted in Diane Kelder, ed., Stuart Davis (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), p. 19.

[2] Sketchbook 14-4 (Drawing for Composition [1863]), 1932. Ink on paper, 6¼ x 8¼ inches. Estate of the Artist.

[3] As Davis insisted, “your picture is a two-dimensional reality at all points of its conception, execution and finish, and to consider it in any other manner is to deal in fantasy.” Davis quoted in Kelder, p. 63.

[4] For example, Colonial Cubism (1954; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).

[5] A second mural from 1954-55, for a conference hall in the United Nations complex in New York, was never realized and is known only from a large oil sketch.

[6] The exhibition, “Spring 1955. New Painting and Sculpture,” included three gouaches by Davis as well as work by Ben Shahn, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and William Zorach. It ran from April 26 to May 21, 1955. Howard Devree, “About Art and Artists,” New York Times, April 27, 1955, p. 26.