John Marin painted this oil on canvas in 1951, two years before his death, probably near his summer home on Cape Split on the Atlantic coast of Maine. An unidentified woman sits on a rocky outcropping by the sea and focuses her attention on a seagull flying at the upper right near the horizon line. Typical of Marin’s final phase of artistic development, he reduced elements such as the waves and wind to expressive lines that convey a sense of rhythm and motion. Other than the bright red horizontal stripes of the woman’s bathing suit, Marin has used only a few subdued colors. White paint in and around the figures of both the woman and the seagull highlights them as focal points of this enigmatic composition.

This work strongly evokes famous images of bathers by the great French painter Paul Cézanne. Marin first encountered Cézanne’s paintings during his time in Paris, and by midcentury the French master’s work was ubiquitous in American museums, exhibitions, and publications. The unknown subject may be related to some of the portraits of friends and family members Marin painted late in his career, having only sporadically painted portraits before the mid-1940s. Marin scholar Ruth Fine has suggested that following the deaths of his wife in 1945 and close friend Alfred Stieglitz in 1946, and in light of his own failing health, “it was the sense of personal loss that directed Marin to portraiture or perhaps an urge to establish a new link to tradition.”