A letter from the recognized expert on the artist, Dr. Ila Weiss, accompanies this lot.

Dr. Weiss writes of the present work, "Only seven titles in the Memorial Catalogue (less than 1% of the total) were moonlights, all of necessity memories of an observation. Unlike the sunrises, Moonrise on the Seashore captures an introspective mood, its vast, serene solitude conveyed by three horizontal bands in near-monochrome: cool gray in the moonlit sky, warmer gray where reflected on the wet beach (lighter towards the center), and dark grays and browns suggesting the rippling and folding surface of the water—the three punctuated by the vertical accent, just left of center, of the effulgent moon and its reflections on sea and wet foreground (the bar of yellow-white light broken by the dark brown of the shadow of a breaker and crossed by a linear edge of the flowing water)." (unpublished letter, March 2019)

The original owner of the present work, Mr. Richard Butler, was a dedicated patron of the artist as well as a founding member of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.