Renee Andre, A New York 30 Rounding Watch Hill (rhode Island)

Renée André (active 1920s)
A Sailboat Rounding a Headland — Watercolor, 33 × 24.5 cm

This watercolor captures the decisive instant when a New York 30 sloop “rounds” the rocky point at Watch Hill / Napatree Point (Rhode Island), on the threshold of Long Island Sound. The Bermudian mainsail, jib set on a bowsprit, and very low freeboard confirm the identification of an emblematic class of American yachting. Precise washes, reserves of the paper, and a palette of greyed blues, sea-greens, and iron ochers—true “community colors” shared by sailors, poster artists, and regatta watercolorists—achieve visual clarity without superfluous effect.
The historical significance is major: a woman painter chooses not a harbor view but the technical instant of maneuvering a high-performance yacht—an exceptional choice around 1920. The work stands at the crossroads of modernities: the Impressionist legacy of light (Boudin, Signac), Fauvist freedom of line (Dufy), and the return to order for structure; on the American side, the energized watercolor of the Stieglitz circle (John Marin), the pared-down monumentality of Rockwell Kent, Precisionist geometry (Sheeler), and the urban realism of the Ashcan School. It also reflects the codification shaped by yacht clubs (NYYC, Larchmont, Seawanhaka) that fixed the silhouettes and rituals of modern yachting.
By its formal exactness and subject, this sheet constitutes a unique testimony: a rare inscription of a woman artist within the iconography of North American yachting, a precise document of a legendary class, and a piece of transatlantic modernity in which watercolor emerges as a finished work in its own right. A collector’s piece, it illuminates a still-incomplete chapter in the art history of the 1920s.

A detailed entry catalogue is available upon request.