Jules Pascin was an itinerant painter: he was born in Bulgaria, studied in Budapest and Vienna, settled in Paris in 1905, before he left for London in 1914, and shortly afterwards sailed for New York on the Lusitania. This watercolour was made sometime during an extended period of travelling with his wife Hermine around the southern United States and Cuba, which lasted between 1915 and 1920. It was a fruitful period of his career. Though prepossessed for the duration of his career by the subject of women, usually in varying degrees of nudity, his travels in the south afforded him opportunities to work en plein air and for his art to absorb a little sunlight. This watercolour evokes a busy daytime scene at Havana’s port. It is likely that the artist made an underlying drawing in front of the subject, before returning to the studio and completing the work with the addition of watercolour. Fragmentary cloud and rippling water are the focus of carefully graded colouring and gently distorted lines, while a combination of sailing boats and steamers populate the harbour. Cuban dockhands linger at the water’s edge, most dressed in white and all wearing hats; Pascin captured a lull in the day’s activities and they await the arrival of a boat, either to load or disembark its cargo. Cranes of an elementary construction break the horizon and reach into the sky, framing the scene. Drawing on the Parisian milieu of impressionist and post-impressionist artists with which Pascin had grown familiar over the previous decade, this work translates to the Caribbean the distinctively French imagery of Boudin’s bustling harbour or Monet’s sailing regatta.