Every summer between 1902 and 1914 Orpen returned to Ireland to teach at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. His ‘brilliant teaching’, the Irish art historian John Turpin has written, followed the example of the Slade, and ‘inspired a whole generation of Irish artists.’ Orpen rented a house on the coast at Howth, where he had grown up and where this watercolour was painted.

‘The view looking towards the mainland in the evening, from the top of the Hill of Howth, is wonderful and ever-changing’, Orpen wrote in his memoir, Stories of Old Ireland. ‘Of an evening, as the sun dips, the water of the bay becomes brilliant gold [...]. And the Sheerwater gulls start their laughter, like a bunch of young girls at the side of a road laughing at the passers-by. Ireland! Romance, laughter, and tears!’

When Max Beerbohm came to caricature Orpen in 1914, a drawing later acquired by the Tate collection, it was as a personification of ‘bravura’. Orpen’s capabilities as a draughtsman were almost as renowned as those of Augustus John, being similarly well-practiced and informed by a rich sense of art’s history. In The Yacht Race, Life Class on the Beach and other tinted drawings made at Howth, Orpen showed men, women and children engrossed in leisure pursuits. The seated child in The Yacht Race was repeated—her blue dress turned to yellow—in an oil painting called The Edge of the Cliff, Howth. These relaxed figures, often barefoot, were drawn in precise, sparing outlines. Strong colours were reserved exclusively for accents, emphasising a green hat or a pink jacket, with skin tones made to seem pale and limpid as the sea and sky, their brilliance conveyed by the whiteness of the paper.