Children on the Seashore, Guernsey (Enfants au bord de la mer à Guernesey)

When Renoir died in 1919, hundreds of canvases were still in his studio, and this beach scene was one of them. He had brought it back from a month on Guernsey in 1883, probably painted it indoors, perhaps as a study, and never sold it. Where most of his Guernsey pictures watch the bathers, this one stays with children playing on the shore. In March 1922 the Paris dealer René Gimpel noted in his diary that a new gallery, Barbazanges, had just bought the first 103 pictures from the studio. This canvas was among them. Its stock number, 2432, is still in red crayon on the stretcher, beside a small blue P for Pierre, the painter's eldest son, who inherited it. That July the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes bought it, the same year he chartered the foundation that still shows it.