This is one of Gillies’ last memorialising paintings. It takes us back to his 1930s watercolours and to the red dog in a Gauguin painting that stimulated his sense of colour as a young artist. To William McTaggart’s ghostly beach figures and to the floating forms of Paul Klee. To the picnics on the beach soon after the death of his sister Emma and the death of his friend John Maxwell, his regular camping companion on many painting trips. And it was at this beach that the wife of his friend George Scott-Moncrieff walked into the sea, never to be seen again.