[Wharf, Gloucester, Massachusetts]

This watercolor was painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, almost certainly during the summer of 1934 when Rothko and his wife Edith Sachar (1912–1981) vacationed there with the Averys—Milton (1885–1965), Sally, and March—and Esther and Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974). It depicts the Reed and Gamage wharfs on the Inner Harbor near Smith Cove, the heart of Gloucester’s fishing industry (fig. 1), from a vantage point on Banner Hill, not far from Rothko’s rented house on Calder Street, East Gloucester. The shed on the right in Rothko’s watercolor, with its telltale water tank on the roof (at upper right in the current work), would have been used for processing salt fish. Rothko depicted this wharf several times from varying points of view (see Related Works on Paper). Gottlieb also sketched it from a similar vantage point, possibly alongside Rothko during the summer of 1934, and worked up a detailed ink drawing (fig. 2).