Binford Loading of the Vultee Vengeance Planes

Loading of the Vultee Vengeance Planes, painting by Julien Binford

U.S. Army identifies the location as New York Harbor
Caption in Life magazine (November 20, 1944, page 56) reads as follows:DIVE BOMBERS are loaded on deck of an oil tanker at Pier Two. Superimposed scaffolding built on the deck, a wartime innovation, enables tankers to carry this extra tonnage.
LIFE'S PICTURES department on page 21 reads as follows:For this gigantic, year-long job of painting New York Harbor in wartime (see pp. 55–60), Julien Binford, whose paintings hang in leading U.S. museums, left his farm near Richmond, Va. and settled in New York City. On special Navy boats which were assigned to him he traveled up and down the Hudson and East Rivers and out into the open harbor, for a final look at convoys steaming out into the open Atlantic. The originals of these paintings, which were commissioned by LIFE, will be exhibited in December at New York’s Midtown Galleries.