Google Lens entry: When he taught painting on Cape Cod in 1899, Murphy urged his students to use poetic abstraction to "awaken an emotion" in their viewers. In this landscape, painted that summer, he shows the power of this approach, emphasizing the tonal values and decorative qualities of the scene. This depiction of the flat, boggy landscape along Boston's northern shore shows the rhythmic harmony of shadowy marshes, winding channels of water, and bands of gray suggesting banks of clouds and their reflections.

Hermann Dudley Murphy was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1867. After studying at the Boston Museum School, he worked as a newspaper and magazine illustrator before traveling to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. In Europe, Murphy encountered the Aesthetic Movement and the work of James McNeill Whistler. He began working in a similarly ethereal, dreamy, and tonalist style. Murphy returned to the United States in 1903, where he developed a reputation as a leading Boston artist.