With the sketchbook as his primary companion, Sager Nelson wandered around Gothenburg during his years at Valand's Art School, drawing people he encountered and views he saw. Occasionally, he developed these drawings into finished artworks, which he then sold. Some, executed in 1890, depict views from Gothenburg's harbour, where the artist captured the atmosphere with boats whose rigging and sails are portrayed against the shimmering water, purchased partly by the prominent art collector Thorsten Laurin and partly by the Gothenburg Museum of Art.

The present catalogue item was executed that same spring. The small oil painting on wood, modest in format, truly captures the atmospheric conditions in the harbour: hazy rain-weather air and cool grey water form a sober backdrop against which the colouristic accents play out in the form of the dark red buoy in the foreground and the cinnabar-red chimney of the blue-painted steamer in mid-ground. Above it all, a solitary dazzling white seagull breaks against the grey saturated clouds.

Only a few oil paintings from this very productive period have been preserved. His sketchbook was filled with numerous drafts, but few of these were developed into finished compositions in oil.