This picture part of an ongoing series of works about the sinking of a sailboat (the racing catboat Falcon) off Newport, Rhode Island in the 1890s. The artist's great grandfather, Edward Wanton Smith, age seventeen, was the sole survivor of the wreck, his older brother William and a close friend, the promising young Philadelphia sculptor, Edmund Austin Stewardson, having both drowned when the boat went down. The Smiths were members of the Philadelphia Quaker community which began summering in Newport in the 1700s and who originally purchased and developed the waterfront neighborhood there that is known as The Point.