Horizontally-oriented, this landscape view measures 33 inches tall by 43.5 inches wide and has a plain, silver frame around it. This oil painting features a colorful and abstract depiction of a beach scene off the rocky coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The artist, Stuart Davis, reduces nature’s three-dimensional elements of water, shoreline, and beach to simplified shapes and lines in a palette of blue, black, red, orange, turquoise, yellow, and white planes overlaid with a series of bright, bold lines. The entire background is a rich orange on top of which the scene is painted with abstract details, some of which suggest recognizable features upon close review.

Two large, flat, angular shapes, one black and one red, rest in the top left of the painting. Another irregular, curving red shape is in the middle of the picture, and below this is a large, black, flat-topped trapezoid. These red and black shapes represent the granite boulders and rocks that line the coast. Inside and over the top of these chunky shapes are a variety of colored lines in no repeating placement or pattern. Both long and short, black, white, and teal-blue straight lines run horizontally and vertically throughout the work; two black plus signs appear in the red shape, and yellow squiggly lines dance on the orange background color around the center of the painting; a large, solid white almost-kidney shape with skinny red, yellow, and blue lines divides the royal-blue shape in the bottom left. Other dashes of bright colors and chunks of solid shapes speckle this part of the composition.

The right side of the canvas includes more recognizable features. In the top-right corner a chunky royal-blue patch resembling an S lays on its side. The left side of it has three dots the same color orange as the background; the right side has two short, black lines, the bottom one thicker than the other. A black-lined grid with four squares, resembling a window, appears under the hump of the S on the right, suggesting a beach bungalow. Below this runs a long school-bus yellow patch of paint; it stops in the middle of the canvas. The top is flat, while the bottom of the mostly rectangular yellow shape features sharp points and rounded cutouts, indicating a beach. Along that bottom, craggy edge run red dashes, suggesting footprints in the sand. Along the bottom edge of the yellow is a teal blue, implying water. This broad patch of teal is the largest patch of color in the artwork and takes up roughly the middle third of the right side of the painting. The teal blue toward the top implies water spanning a black looped line, representing waves. In between the yellow shore and the black line of waves appears a small, red capital H with a black dot placed in the center above it. This abstract human figure is the only human figure included in the composition, and it is small compared to the water and rocks surrounding it. The rest of the teal water below the wave line includes filled-in red, blue, and white shapes as well as yellow, blue, black, and white lines, dashes, and swirls.

In the bottom right corner, there appears to be a lighthouse with light shining. An apple-red rhombus, signifying land, angles up and toward the center of the painting with a sky-blue crooked line. A dark brown, straight line extends up a few inches from the top of the red shape. From the top-left side of the brown line, a black rectangle with three white, skinny, diagonal stripes and five orange, wide diagonal stripes appears. A school-bus yellow cone shape appears directly below a slender, flag shape, indicating light and maybe sand; the pinnacle of the yellow shape s down toward the bottom of the brown straight line and the top corner of the yellow shape touches the bottom corner of the striped rectangle above it.