Painting with confidence and a command of the medium, Lee-Smith displays his mature style of
the mid- to late 1950s that had evolved from his social realism of the earlier decade. He explores
the space between a young African-American man in the foreground and the two figures fishing at
a lake’s edge.As in many other paintings of the period, Lee-Smith uses an enigmatic young male as
a stand-in for himself—here he is playing “cat’s cradle” while turning away from the scene. Lee-Smith
constructs the setting with many familiar landscape elements that he will use in the years and decades
to come.These include the rock strewn foreground space, a concrete pier, a distant shore line at the
horizon and a beautiful sky of cumulus clouds.
[60,000/90,000]
