Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved.

He once wrote that it was "a subject which if I have not exhausted has exhausted me. His mother's attempts to be a publiJohn Updiked writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. Later Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich Massachusetts.

John Hoyer Updike (18 March 1932 – 27 January 2009) was an American novelist poet short story writer art critic and literary critic. Hundreds of his stories reviews and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. Describing his subject as "the American small town Protestant middle class" Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship his unique prose style and his prolificity.