Francis Augustus Silva painted coastal, beach, and river scenes that represent the culmination of the landscape mode, dubbed “luminism” by modern scholars, characterized by broad, horizontal compositions with low horizons, delicate color, and crystalline light. Silva was a native of New York City and the son of a barber. Apprenticed to a sign painter, he received little formal training in art. In his early twenties, he had a studio of his own in New York before joining the Union Army during the Civil War. Silva served in the same regiment as the established landscape painter Sanford R. Gifford, and although no contact between the two has been documented, it is possible that the younger artist received some instruction or guidance from the older.

Silva launched his professional career in 1868, when he first exhibited at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design. From the first, he concentrated on scenes of water and shore, using an insistently horizontal format and low horizon to emphasize skies and natural light. From his studio in New York, Silva traveled along the New England coast in search of landscape settings to paint. In the 1860s, he repeatedly painted scenes of Narragansett, Cape Ann, and Boston; in the following decade, his attention turned southward to the Hudson River and the Connecticut shore. Several drawings and paintings of Venetian scenes dated 1879 are the only evidence that Silva ever traveled abroad. In 1880, he moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, where he found numerous subjects for paintings. However, he maintained a studio in New York, working in the 1880s in the famed Tenth Street Studio Building, where his fellow tenants constituted a “Who’s Who” of contemporary American landscape painters.

Silva favored sunset and twilight settings, and he occasionally painted landscapes flooded with moonlight. The diffuse colored light in his earlier works gave way in the 1870s to a more crystalline, precise illumination. This shift was informed by his increasing use of watercolor painting not only for preparatory studies but for finished works, many exhibited at New York’s American Watercolor Society. Silva’s typical works are serene images that make reference to human activity on shore and water, such as vessels for pleasure sailing and for fishing, beach picnics, and cottages overlooking the shore. In his last decade, however, Silva often included features with graver symbolic resonance, particularly shipwrecked vessels.