The American Modernist and painter of the Harlem Renaissance, Lois Mailou Jones attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1923-27), was educated further in Paris, and had significant influence on generations of art students who attended Howard University, where she taught most of her life. The Blue Boat, a watercolor painted in 1943 in Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard reveals Jones's early work as an independent artist after she gave up commercial art and turned from design to observed reality - portraiture and landscape. Yet the rhythms and pattern of colors in this view of the small boat, virtually hidden in the foliage on the shore, are typical of the strong design elements that pervade Jones's work.

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