‘We were always his admiring audience. Mainly we were always there, ready to be the source of new arrangement of colors and forms; ready to personalize a landscape.’ – Sally Michel Avery (1988)

Bathers and beachgoers are staples of Avery’s art, and coastal scenes, sometimes populated by his family and friends, occur throughout his career. Writing in the catalogue for the 1971 exhibition Paintings by Milton Avery and his Family, Frank Getlein places Avery squarely among a lineage of coastal painters: ‘In terms of subject matter, Avery was one of the greatest and perhaps the last of the seashore painters, a tradition that finds its roots in Claude Lorraine and Constable but that really established itself with Boudin and Homer, working at about the same time in France and the United States.’

While the Averys spent the Summers of 1962 and 63 in Lake Hill, north of Woodstock, New York, it is likely that Sally by the Sea, 1962, was completed in New York from an earlier drawing. Throughout his career, Avery’s habit was to devote his summers to drawing and making watercolours, which would serve as the basis for the oil paintings he worked on during the winters back in New York – a routine that goes some way in explaining his art’s sense of endless summer.

About the artist

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Milton Avery (1885–1965) is celebrated for his luminous paintings of landscapes, figures and still lifes, which balance distillation of form with free, vigorous brushwork and lyrical colour.

Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, a major retrospective of Avery’s work commences at The Modern, Fort Worth this autumn (7 November 2021–30 January 2022), travelling to the Wadsworth Atheneum (24 February–5 June 2022) and the Royal Academy of Arts (15 July–16 October 2022).

Avery’s work is represented in major museums and private collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; LACMA; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; MoMA; National Gallery of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection; SFMOMA; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Tate; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.