Second Beach, Newport

Worthington Whittredge

National Gallery of Art

We look slightly down onto a bay that curves away from us into the distance and to our right in this horizontal landscape painting. C-shaped, shallow waves lap at the sandy beach from our right. Several people standing and playing in the water wear hats and long-sleeved shirts. Two women there hold up their skirts as they wade in the ankle-deep water, a small brown dog close behind them. Another person wearing white walks on the wet sand, and four more gather a short distance away, to our left, perhaps on a blanket. Opposite us and far away, brown horses pull a carriage along the beach. The taupe-colored sand is hemmed in by a curving band of celery-green grasses, which in turn surround dunes or hills and a rocky formation. A tree-lined hill gives way to the rocky promontory that juts onto the beach where the shoreline curves to our right. The promontory has a crack near the bottom, resembling the open mouth of a turtle. Beyond this, touches of white paint suggest buildings deep in the distance, in front of slate-gray hills lining the horizon. In the top two-thirds of the picture, flat-bottomed, white clouds drift across a sky that deepens from nearly white along the horizon to pale blue across the top edge of the composition. The artist signed the painting in the lower left corner, with spiky, left-leaning letters in lavender purple: “W. Whittredge.”