Original Watercolour Harbour Scene with the Seiner Eagle, Signed Lorraine, Double Matted in Gilt, 2004

The Piece

An original watercolour of a working harbour, signed Lorraine and dated 2004 in pencil at the lower right, set in a double mat inside a fluted gilt frame.

The centre of it is a fishing boat moored in front of a long waterfront shed. Her dark hull carries the name EAGLE in white capitals at the bow, and aft sits the big net drum of a seiner, drawn as a pale round reel against the purple wall behind. The shed is washed in violet and lilac with a white roof and a few small dark windows, and further along a green-roofed boathouse stands out over the water on pilings.

In front of her a small cabin cruiser comes through with a figure in a red jacket at the stern, and a two-masted sailboat lies at anchor with a single figure aboard. Behind everything a hillside of dark conifers rises in soft wet-in-wet washes, the trees bleeding into each other the way they do on a grey coastal morning.

The painting is better than it first lets on. The rigging, the rails and the boat name are picked out in opaque white over the finished washes, which is what makes the boats snap forward from the background. The water is left mostly as bare paper with a few lavender and blue strokes, so the cold-press surface itself does the sparkle. The foreground is a band of grass drawn in fine green and ochre lines over a yellow wash, and it frames the whole scene the way standing on the bank would.

History & Provenance

The painting is signed and dated by the artist, so there is no question of when it was made. Lorraine is signed by first name only, which is how many serious regional painters signed work sold locally or given to family, and no further identification is claimed here.

The subject is a type rather than a postcard view. A drum seiner moored beside a painted cannery-style shed, a boathouse on pilings and a dark wall of evergreens behind is the look of the small working harbours of the Pacific Northwest coast, where the drum seine replaced the hand-hauled net and became the signature boat of the salmon fleet. Whether this is a particular harbour or a composite, the details are right: the drum is where it should be, the boathouse sits on the kind of pilings those waters demand, and the light is the soft grey of that coast.

It has been professionally framed with care. The double mat pairs a cream top mat with a narrow gilt inner mat and a cream bevel, and the fluted gilt frame carries a fine dark speckle across its face that softens the gold and keeps it from looking new.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is an original, not a print, and you can see it in the paper: the grain of the cold-press sheet shows through the washes, the white highlights stand up off the surface, and every line of grass was put there by hand. It is a painting made by someone who knew boats and knew how to leave paper alone.

The palette is the reason it works in a room. Violet, lilac, soft blue and deep evergreen are rare in marine painting, which usually leans hard on navy and white, and here they give it a calm that suits a bedroom, a study or a guest room as well as a coastal house. The gilt frame warms it up enough to sit beside wood furniture and brass. Hang it out of direct sunlight, as with any watercolour.