A Beach at Ebb Tide

The tide is out and the beach is nearly empty. One woman walks across the wet sand with a basket on her back, gathering shellfish, and the rest of the panel is given to the flats and a pink evening sky. The Rijksmuseum identifies the shore as Villerville, on the coast of Normandy. The picture is small, 35 by 55 centimetres, painted on wood, and Daubigny signed it at the lower right without a date.

It came to Amsterdam through Baron Reinhard van Lynden and his wife, Baroness van Lynden-van Pallandt, who together collected nearly 90 paintings, many of them French landscapes of Daubigny's generation, and left them to the Rijksmuseum. The pictures from the family estate of Lyndenstein in Friesland arrived in 1899. His widow did not wait for her own death and gave the collection from their house in The Hague in 1900.