Martínez Abades won great acclaim for his seascape paintings in the style of fin-de-siècle naturalism. He devoted his life to travelling around the coast of Spain with a special focus on the Cantabrian Sea and particularly on his hometown of Gijon, where he found an iconography he felt close to, as we may see in this work.

The scene represents how coal was loaded by means of drawn barges from a large steam ship whose draft prevented it from docking in the old shipyard of Gijón, as the new harbour of El Musel would not open until 1907. The naturalist detail of the features of the weather captures the atmosphere of a cloudy day, with the waters darkened and the air loaded with carbon particles, a recurrent industrial motif in the production of this artist.

This is a replica of the homonymous painting currently held in the Museo Jovellanos of Gijón, which was entered in the of 1904, where it received a medal, and which the painter would later modify in his studio in Madrid, making the ship smaller and changing its position. The fact that this canvas reproduces the appearance of original painting -which we know from an old photograph- makes it of great documentary value.