On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Sunrise, Northport Harbor,
1929
Arthur Dove likely painted Sunrise, Northport Harbor, while sailing on the Mona, a forty-two-foot yawl he purchased in 1922 that served as his primary residence until his move to Geneva, New York, in 1933. The painting presents a view across Northport Harbor, Long Island, at dawn. Less concerned with recording objective facts than evoking through abstract form nature’s fundamental forces, Dove employs concentric circles of bright white, yellow, and orange to convey the warmth and radiance of sunlight. A smaller set of circles appears to float on the water, suggesting the reflection of the sun or perhaps serving as an emblem for the artist, whose pictures similarly reflect and refract the world. It could be that Dove, buoyed by the waves while painting shipboard, felt especially attuned to water and its properties, prompting him to register in his canvas his affinity with the ever-changing sea.
Rachael Z. DeLue, Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, Princeton University
More Context
Handbook Entry
Although renowned for his production, around 1910, of perhaps the earliest abstract works by an American, Arthur Dove alternated his imagery between representational and nonrepresentational modes, unified by a common aesthetic of repeating, often interlocking, shapes that reveal his belief in the essential movement and interpenetration of life. Completed in 1929, <em>Sunrise, Northport Harbor </em>depicts an area on Long Island’s North Shore favored by the artist, rendered in the vocabulary of swelling, curvilinear forms of modulating color then characteristic of his work, through which he sought to portray a nonautonomous perception of nature. The painting was exhibited at An American Place, the Manhattan gallery run by the photographer and influential promoter of American Modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who championed Dove’s work from the beginning of his career.
More About This Object
Information
1929
North America, United States, New York, Northport, Northport Harbor
- "Recent acquisitions," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 22, no. 1 (1963): p. 15-19., p. 16
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 74
- John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 335, checklist no. 763 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 189 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 411
