Pond in Sunlight

Pond in Sunlight was painted in 1935, late in Dove's career. A teal-green serpentine line zigzags across the center of the composition, encircled by a yellow-ochre arch. Below it, a band of dusty pink curves over a wider band of pale blue — a pond, abstracted to its essential shapes. Two small irregular forms in coral pink and indigo sit at the lower corners. Dove's signature, a small "Dove," is at the bottom center. The whole image is built from a few wide brushstrokes of watercolor on white paper, and reads as both a landscape seen from above and a pure exercise in color and rhythm.