Sunrise, Northport Harbor

Arthur Dove spent much of the 1930s living on the water in Centerport and Northport on Long Island's north shore, first aboard the houseboat Mona and later at a farmhouse in Geneva, New York, before returning to Centerport in 1938. The Northport Harbor paintings belong to the sustained body of work he produced during years of financial hardship and recurring illness, supported almost entirely by the patronage and advocacy of Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited Dove annually at his gallery An American Place. Working within the tradition of American modernism and what historians now identify as lyrical abstraction, Dove was the first American painter to commit fully to non-objective work (predating the Abstract Expressionists by more than a decade) and the harbor sunrise subjects represent the convergence of his synesthetic approach with a deeply personal attachment to a specific coastal geography. Critics aligned with Stieglitz recognized these harbor compositions as evidence that Dove had found, in the language of color and organic form, an equivalent for the felt experience of a place rather than merely its appearance.