Naftulin started this landscape in 1963, after she and her husband vacationed in Maine, but
later reworked it over an extended period. Her introduction of bright turquoise was inspired by the paintings of Matisse at the Barnes Foundation and, in 1970, at the Matisse Exposition du Centenaire at the Grand Palais in Paris. "Before going to Barnes, Paul Cézanne was my idol, she says, "but at the Barnes I fell in love with Matisse."
This canvas is among the first in which Naftulin conveyed her memory of a place rather than
trying, as before, to faithfully capture a naturalistic representation of a landscape. Mountain, Beach in Maine was exhibited in the Woodmere Art Museum's 1971 Thirty-First Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Watercolors, and Sculpture, where it was awarded the Lillian E. Burdine Memorial Prize. Purchased by Woodmere later that year, it was her first work to be acquired by a public institution.
