Paintings by Arthur Lismer placed Nova Scotia in Canada’s national art movement. Compositions like ours of Lunenburg by Lismer demonstrated that Nova Scotia's people,bustling harbours, docks and seascapes could be portrayed with the same modernist approach as the forests of Ontario or the Rocky Mountains. No other member of the Group of Seven painted a meaningful body of work of Nova Scotia, or of the Maritimes for that matter.

This Arthur Lismer shows a Lunenburg’s shipyard scene with workers engaged in the construction of a wooden vessel. Lismer focuses on the scale of the ship, its skeletal ribs dominating the composition. Demonstrative of Lismer’s interest in the working life of the people of coastal Nova Scotia, he captures several of the boatbuilders working away at their respective tasks. Historically, boatbuilding was a defining industry of Lunenburg.

In the next generation of painting in Canada the identity of the Maritimes was developed by Mary & Christopher Pratt, Alex Colville, Tom Forrestall, Lawren S. Harris in painting and, in printmaking, David Blackwood.