Tellaeche’s long years working as a sailor and his seafaring knowledge show in the treatment and depiction of the sails, whose folds dominate the composition.

The aridity of the palette, reinforced by the sepia tone of the support used—visible in parts of this piece—the plasticity of the sails, and the rotundity of the architectural volumes, are typical of the building process of the painter, who makes a singular use of the pastel technique, with slanted and parallel strokes that herald the brushwork of his oil paintings.

This is one of the works in a series of similar compositions made in oil as well as pastel devoted to the representation of the sails of ships docked at the harbour of Orio in Gipuzkoa, which is seen in the background of the composition and among whose buildings stands out the parish church of San Nicolás. Among these works is a pastel painting whose dimensions and composition are nearly identical to those of the piece in the BBVA Collection.