Burned Hill by the Sea was created among a series of watercolors Milton Avery produced during a two-month family vacation to Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula in 1938. The landscape of the Gaspé peninsula—with its bright seaside light, rolling hills, steep coastal cliffs, and “severe geometry” of villages and surrounding fields—touched the artist deeply and catalyzed some of his most inspired works of the period. Preferring the pictorial freedom permitted by high vantage points, Avery explored in the early Gaspé landscapes formal principles that would influence the character of his mature aesthetic; from atop hills or cliffs, he was able to rationally flatten deep space, while transforming elements that lay before him into a harmonious interplay of discrete shapes. These watercolors furthermore exhibit a remarkable lightness and spontaneity of touch, as the artist applies thoughtful and cohesive color palettes to playfully patterned forms. The technical and formal successes of the Gaspé compositions may be attributed to, as curator Karen Wilkin describes, the artist’s pleasure in the qualities of the medium— specifically, as she details, "the way thinned-out paint flows on paper, the way the thick watercolor paper, at the same time, resists the liquid paint, [and] the way small hand gestures can become expressive marks” (K. Wilkins, Milton Avery: Paintings of Canada, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, 1986, p. 19).

With a notable emphasis on visual drama, Avery depicts in Burned Hill by the Sea a dynamic balance between death and life, as much as he does color and form. Here, he poses in the foreground the darkened remnants of a once formidable tree trunk, now unstable with roots exposed against the scorched and scarred hilltop. This somber evocation of loss is, however, refuted in a brief passage, far beyond the hill, where an organic wash of pale green envelops small, defined marigold fields; here, it suggests, that life continues to flourish. Avery would continue to explore the Gaspé motifs upon his return to New York, producing just months later an oil painting with a nearly identical composition to that of Burned Hill by the Sea, entitled Burned Hill—Gaspé.

The son of a tanner, Avery began working at a local factory at the age of 16 and supported himself for decades with a succession of blue-collar jobs. His interest in art led him to attend classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford, and over a period of years, he painted in obscurity while receiving a conservative art education. In 1917, he began working night jobs in order to paint in the daytime. In 1924, he met Sally Michel, a young art student, and in 1926, they married. Her income as an illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting. For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s, Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery's work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With the work of Milton Avery rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter. In the 1930s, he was befriended by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko among many other artists living in New York City in the 1930s–40s. It was Rothko who wrote perhaps the most vivid summation of Avery's art, quoted above. Avery’s works are in the collections of many important museums, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Australia, Tate Modern in London, Philadelphia Museum of Art and others.