Coast Guard Station, Two Lights, Maine

By 1927 Edward Hopper was in his mid-40s and finally selling, largely on the strength of watercolours like this one. He spent summers on Cape Elizabeth in Maine, where two lighthouses known as Two Lights stood near a Coast Guard station on the coast. In his own ledger he noted the spot's "very clean and swept look", and that is what he painted: bright sand, hard blue water, and the plain gabled station under a high sun. He worked the rocks and sea in loose, transparent washes and drew the building's angles tight, with a thin flagpole rising off the roof.