Painted in brilliant colors with lighting reminiscent of a Turner seascape, it portrays a fishing village with a line of majestic bluffs rising behind it.
But Rothko's aquatic colors are reflected in the painterly washes of a lovely 1917 John Marin seascape, unrelated to the Rothko exhibition, just outside the entrance to the show.
They float in carefully defined spaces and are often firmly anchored with some sort of horizontal ground that can be as insistent as the horizon in a 17th-century Dutch seascape.