Footnotes

Provenance
The Downtown Gallery, New York, acquired from the artist.
O. Louis Guglielmi, New York, acquired from the above, by 1949.
Mrs. O. Louis Guglielmi, New York, wife of the above.
Sale, Christie's, New York, September 30, 1982, lot 38. (as Town with Boats)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited
Pittsburgh, Outlines Gallery, Stuart Davis, March 3-31, 1946.
Boston, Boris Mirski Art Gallery in Cooperation with The Downtown Gallery, New York, Thirty Americans Speak, October 26-November 26, 1949, n.p.
Boston, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, For Cape Ann, Past and Present, February 7-March 3, 1987.
Boston, Mercury Gallery, City Signs, June 23-July 18, 1994.

Literature
J. Hardy Wright, Images of America: Gloucester and Rockport, Charleston, South Carolina, 2000, p. 66, illustrated.
A. Boyajian, M. Rutkowski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. II, p. 592, no. 1168, illustrated.

Following his 1928-1929 sojourn to Paris, where he completely incorporated Cubist compositional structures into his creative practice via his Eggbeaters series, Stuart Davis began to develop his own principle of design and color harmonies. During this time, Davis devoted most of his efforts on drawing and creating works on paper and significantly reduced the number of paintings he produced. The reasons for the reduction in painting output was brought on by a myriad factors, including personal traumas, social reform activism, and the financial constraints brought on by the Great Depression. Davis used these drawings as a means to explore the relationships between line, color, and composition, which he would later refer to as "color-space" theory. As he noted in his sketchbook in 1932, "One must learn to see the space not simply the boundaries of objects . . . One must see the 'shapes' of the space not the shapes of the objects that occur in it" (Davis, Sketchbook 13-25, Untitled, 1932.)

In particular, Davis was dedicated to exploring different ways of interpreting with the boats in the harbor of Gloucester. As Karen Wilken wrote, "In Gloucester, he focused (the same affectionate scrutiny) on the complexities of the working harbor-ropes, derricks, rigging, lobster pots, boatsheds, and all the other visually arresting waterfront accoutrements of a fishing town. He clearly was fascinated by the way rigging and masts measure and discipline whatever is seen through them, like an unpredictable, irregular grid . . . The clash of vertical and horizontal elements in the rigging of the ships that crowded the Gloucester harbor, along with all the complicated onshore equipment, seem to have helped Davis to make drawings dictated by this (the above) principle" (A. Boyajian, M. Rutkowski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. I, p. 80).

Davis believed that underlying design of a work, formulated during the drawing period, was the lynchpin to creating a successful work of art and the shapes and planes created by the interplay between the masts and rigging, when juxtaposed to the buildings and docks, were successful "configurations" and were continual sources of inspiration. "Davis clearly regarded the drawings made in the 1930s, particularly the rich, inventive images of the boats, harbor, and dock litter of Gloucester, as successful configurations. Far from being rapid, relatively flexible alternatives to painting during a period when his time in the studio was curtailed, these probing drawings provided a rich lode of provocative imagery that Davis mined, both consciously and unconsciously, for much of the rest of his working life, even long after he stopped spending extended periods on Cape Ann . . . The clean, angular character of Davis's Gloucester drawings of the 1930s persists in virtually all of his subsequent work." (Ibid, p. 80-81)

As we can see in Town and Boats, Davis is denoting the shapes created by masts, rigging, buildings and other parts of the harbor though the use of contrasting-colored lines of blue, orange and black. The intersecting lines can at times be so simplified, they are abstract and no longer representative of the original object they are meant to denote. When focusing solely on the orange lines to the right of the vertical black line which bisects the composition, the masts, rigging and hulls of two boats is clearly apparent, though if you focus on the blues in this same half, it is a mixture of buildings, netting and bouys, which demarcate the space. On the left half of the composition, the surface is dominated my buildings and factories, with a few diagonal blue lines to indicate the sails of the vessels. Overall, the composition is a simple but powerful rendering of this beloved fishing town.

The present work, with additional linear elements added to the composition at upper left, was authorized by Stuart Davis for Castleton China in 1949 for their edition of ceramic plates that incorporated designs by American artists.