Dazzled from port Clyde to Paris.

• Position: Museums Todays - Great landscape paintings by Barbara Ernst Prey

ALMOST 40 VIVID watercolors by Barbara Ernst Prey, whose poignant paintings--many of seascapes and others of the fisherman's off-season workshop--will go on display this summer in a much-anticipated exhibition that should prove to be one of the highlights of the current season, as Prey is considered to be among the foremost landscape painters of the 21st century active in the U.S. today. Her paintings are in the collections of major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Smithsoniau American Art Museum.

Prey's development as an artist is characterized by intense and exacting study of subject, color, and light, as well as a rich accumulation of life experiences. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., invited her to lecture on "The Watercolors of Winslow Homer," testifying to the central position Prey's work plays in the continuing history of American art. The President and First Lady invited Prey to paint the official White House Christmas card and her artwork currently is on display in the White House and included in its permanent collection.

"It is a powerful sense of human presence--despite the absence of the figure--infused with a compelling aura of place and history that, above all, characterizes this group of Prey's exquisitely conceived and rendered watercolors," exudes Sarah Cash, curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., who will extend those duties to this exhibition when it travels abroad later this year.

"In Prey's paintings," she continues, "our imaginations are enticed not only by the scenes themselves, but by the exquisitely wrought details that animate the compositions. These intricately composed works also testify to her predilection for strong color and her interest in probing beneath exterior appearances. Both 'Sanctum II' and 'Finish Coat' provide glimpses into these bright and congenial havens for the off-season fishing work of trap repair, buoy painting, and line cleaning, as well as socializing. In 'Finish Coat,' tiers upon tiers of painstakingly drawn and painted buoys-still lives, as the artist notes--hang to dry at last light. In 'Sanctum II,' Prey is fascinated with the artistic license and humor of the lobsterman who marks not only his buoys but his surroundings with his specific buoy colors. Together, these elements comprise a perfect case study of Prey's mastery of the unforgiving medium of watercolor.

"Completely different, but just as...