Painting based on a black-and-white photograph of the wreck of the Alice on the coast of Oregon on 15 January 1909 (San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, J. Porter Shaw Library).   The inspiration for this painting was a poem titled “The Sea,” by James Simmons, one stanza of which reads  “It has no cruelty nor sense/Of humor nor indifference/ Before men came it washed this shore,/It will when they come here no more.”