There were shadows in the Ostrom household that could make you expect hidden messages. Family members said Mr. Ostrom was stoic and taciturn, raised in a corner of the Pacific Northwest near the mouth of the Columbia River where Finnish immigrants came in the 1800s for the fishing. He was scarred, his relatives said, by the sudden and never-explained death of his father, a fisherman and farmer, when Arvi was 5, and by the hard life that came after. Loss always seemed to lurk on the horizon. Mr. Ostrom refused to tell his five children — all daughters — that he loved them, for example, the oldest said, because he said he didn’t want them to be too sad when he died.

The Snug Harbor was never a place Mr. Ostrom loved, either, despite decades behind the bar, selling sandwiches and coffee to fishermen heading out in the mornings and beer when they came back at night. The bar put food on the table for the big family. His daughters were forbidden to set foot in the place.

A heartbreaking truth about Mr. Ostrom and his passion: The pieces of art he felt best about, and proudest of, were ones he hid away. Perhaps, his grandson said, he feared the prospect of rejection or loss. He had tried to sell some work early in life and eventually gave up. In an art correspondence course he took in 1928 from Federal Schools Inc. of Minneapolis, he was given a grade of “fairly good,” according a letter he kept along with the stacks of work.