This painting is an excellent and exceptional example of the period of maturity in Cossío’s practice in which harbour scenes and seascapes returned to the focus of his compositions. Although there were some precedents from the 1920s, it would be in the 1930s when his interest for these subject matters truly took hold, possibly after his discovery of the coast of Saint-Tropez, which triggered his later evocations of the Cantabrian landscape in which he grew up.

In this port scene, dated in 1957, the forms are camouflaged, shrouded in a golden mist that allows us a glimpse of the outlines of the dock and the boats. Caught between the sea and the city, the setting is endowed with a highly unusual formal serenity.

It is an imagined, dream-like landscape, the evident outcome of the style of “poetic painting” of Spaniards from the . In this golden seascape, the large areas of colour and the heavier long curved brushstrokes floating on the composition have been replaced by highly elaborated flat rubbings and impastos through which Cossío achieves a sense of light and a subtle and dense misty colour. This work is typical of this artist’s melancholic and deeply nostalgic, romantic streak.