In a nice homage to the works of master marine artist J.M.W. Turner, James Hamilton has captured a subtle vignette of coastal boats and local villagers trading in the day's fresh catch while the tide is out. The vast sense of a wet plane that stretches endlessly to other worlds is echoed in the smallest presence of other ships sailing along at a great distance, while in the immediacy, a woman in red and another in white look through the baskets of fish for their families next meals.
Hamilton puts forth an artistic composition with an extremely soft palette that still includes a ruddy ochre, stark white and hard brown in the sailing ships' wood and sails. A quick small strike of blue, a dash of yellow and all blended in what one first might make out to be a painting of simplicity, which is instead quite an evolved and well-thought out artwork. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the artist's creation of the reflective nature of the objects down to and through the marshy water. There exists direct crosshatching strokes and a mix of colors pulling from every object present.
Hamilton financed a worldwide trip with the paintings he marketed in 1875, and then returned to settle in San Francisco for his last years of his outstanding career. This undoubtably was a featured piece in a "Turneresque style" which is a departure from his usually deep red coastal sunsets with ships at a great distance.
