Gully at Low Tide

John Sloan, a member of "The Eight" and a true New York Realist was well known for his "gritty" images of urban life on the Lower East Side. However in 1914, his search for a new environment where he could devote his energies to work "from nature to get ideas about plastic design and color rhythms," took him to Gloucester, Massachusetts. This historic fishing port on Cape Ann on the North Shore of Massachusetts had been a haven for artists since the 1870s. . There he joined a group of artists including Leon Kroll, Paul Cornoyer, Randall Davey, and Stuart Davis. These artists began to create a pictorial record of the place Sloan called "one of the odd corners of America, built against Puritan landscape, blue-eyed and rocky." Sloan returned there every summer through 1918.