The Hoppers spent the month of August driving around looking for a motif. Hopper was depressed and irritable but finally, in early September, began Lee Shore.

Gail Levin has pointed out that the house is done from memory and is similar to the riverfront houses in Nyack, New York, where Hopper was born and where, the previous summer, he had done a commission portrait of Helen Hayes’s house, Pretty Penny. Levin 344

Lee Shore was finished on October 4th.

There are three other major Hopper sailing paintings - The Long Leg, 1935, Ground Swell, 1939 and The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet, 1944, as well as an early work, Sailing, 1911. In each, the sails provide Hopper a structural
element with which to play with light.

There are thirteen known study drawings -nine in private collections.
The drawing reproduced on this page is also reproduced in the catalogue raisonné, figure 320.1, page 284.