A Canaletto style composition with the low foreground and vast sky. It was a style initiated by eighteenth century Venetian painters for atmosphere rather than design (they felt little need to crowd their perfect skies). The clear unpolluted water and the clean unpolluted minds and bodies of the people as they frolic on the shore and in the sea provides the contrast to the ship's dark menace that stains the bay with the artificiality of what Rousseau described as the ‘un-natural structure and artificiality of European society.’ A high value Prussian blue begins to invade some of these Otahitean scenes as they require a different palette.