Walter Griffin became active in the Old Lyme artists’ colony around 1905, forming lasting friendships and exhibiting with fellow painters Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Ernest Lawson and John Henry Twachtman. He began taking part in annual shows at the Pennsylvania Academy and the National Academy, which elected Griffin an Associate in 1912, before traveling abroad again in 1908. Prior to departing for Europe, however, Griffin spent a short time on Monhegan Island, Maine, where this pastel of fifish shacks along a rocky shoreline was drawn. Although he worked there only briefly, the island’s isolation and rugged beauty offered him a dose of therapy after his divorce from Lillian Baynes Griffin, a photographer and journalist, whom he married in 1899.

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