A determined and untraditional woman, Harriet Lumis established a successful painting career despite the distinct inconvenience of living in Springfield, Massachusetts, far from the established crosscurrents of the art world. She began her formal training relatively late as well, attending Springfield's Evening Free Hand Drawing School only after she had already married and reached the age of 23. Once she resolved to become an artist, however, Lumis forged ahead, making up for lost time and helping to cultivate a robust professional art community in the area around Springfield, Massachusetts, where her husband served as the city's building commissioner.

Though she never studied abroad, Lumis is best known for her impressionistic landscapes and townscapes, and is recognized today for her use of vibrant color in works like Gloucester Wharf. Her early works were darker and more tonalist in nature, however, reflecting the influence of teachers including Leonard Ochtman, Edward Parker Hayden, Roswell Gleason Shurtleff and others. But after encountering the work of Claude Monet, Lumis radically altered her approach, and her canvases increasingly began to incorporate light and color.

Though Lumis exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show and elsewhere, and approached near-celebrity status in her regional art community, she remained ambitious and continued to seek out new approaches and ideas to advance her work. At the age of fifty, she enrolled in Hugh Henry Breckenridge's summer art school in Gloucester, a decision that would have profound impact upon her painting [R.H. Love, Harriet Randall Lumis: An American Impressionist (1977), p. 16]. She attended the school for three summers, gradually incorporating Breckenridge's influence - particularly his intense interest in color theory -- into her own style. The present work exhibits Lumis' bolder, almost expressionistic palette, as well as the liberal amount of pigment she employed in her mature work to convey a sense of form and structure.

In Gloucester Wharf, Lumis sets up a lively contrast between the horizontal ribbons of paint that define the water and the strong vertical brushstrokes used to depict the buildings of downtown Gloucester. Unlike other artists of her generation, she had little interest in painting figures or incorporating them into her landscape compositions. Focusing on outdoor scenery, she became "a master of selective composition;" if the vistas she observed before her left something to be desired, "she compensated through her exploitation of pictorial harmonies and contrasts and…through her spontaneous manipulation of bright pigment" [R.H. Love, Harriet Randall Lumis: Grande Dame of Landscape Painting (1989), p. 6].

Harriet Lumis was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, Gloucester Society of Artists, Philadelphia Artists Alliance, Boston Art Club, National Association of Women Artists, and a founding member of the Springfield Art League in 1919 and the Academic Artists Association in 1949. Lumis exhibited extensively in such prestigious venues as the Armory Show (1913), Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts (1913, 1915), National Academy of Design (1923, 1929, 1931), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1928), Springfield Art League, and the Women's National Expo in St. Louis (1928).

Her work is in the collection of such notable private and public institutions as the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Bush-Holley Historic Museum, Greenwich, CT; and the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT, among many others.