Narragansett Bay

William Stanley Haseltine

National Gallery of Art

We look out across a band of broad, craggy boulders at an ocean bay dotted with boats in this horizontal landscape painting. The tops of the flat boulders are caramel brown in the sunlight and darker, rust-brown shadows down the sides. Smoke-gray fissures create web-like crevices across their surfaces. A few rocks sit atop the boulders, and a glassy pool created in a shallow near the lower right corner reflects the pale blue sky. The water beyond is a blend of aquamarine blue and bottle green with choppy waves that break and spray up white against the boulders. Two people wearing straw-colored hats are near the water on the far side of the boulders. One wears a red shirt, brown pants, and holds out a fishing rod. A basket sits near his feet nearby. Just to our left, a woman wearing a rose-pink dress sits and seems to look off into the distance. One sailboat is at the center of the composition in the distance, and several, even smaller touches of ivory-white along the horizon suggest more sailboats almost out of sight. Also hazy in the far distance, a finger of sand-brown land topped with pale, sage-green growth extends about halfway across the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. A few light gray clouds drift across the sky, which lightens from powder blue across the top to nearly white along the horizon. Several white birds with black wing tips fly over the water. The artist initialled and dated the lower left, “W.S.H 64.”