Surf Under Moonlight

This monumental seascape shows the coast just off of St. Ives, Cornwall, in England, where the artist began the canvas around 1906. The work records the magnificent colors of the beach at night under full moonlight. The foreground is a swirl of white seafoam and in the middle ground, waves crash over rocks along the coast. Known primarily as a marine painter, Waugh studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and with his father, renowned Philadelphia portrait painter, Samuel Bell Waugh (1814 – 1885). Waugh describes the painting in a letter dated June 1930 as having, “come about through my observation of a point of rocky coast on the south west side of St. Ives, just at the end of the beach. I had gone out there frequently at night to study the sea under the light of the full moon…”