Girls Fishing for Mussels

Renoir first painted this group in 1879, on one of his summer stays on the Normandy coast near Dieppe, where the banker Paul Bérard, a loyal early supporter, kept a country house and often had him to stay. That first version, set at the village of Berneval, stands almost 1.8 metres tall. It was shown at the official Paris Salon of 1880, soon passed to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, and now hangs at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. This canvas, only 56 centimetres high, came about ten years later. The Pola Museum, which owns it, believes Renoir worked it up in his Paris studio from studies made on those earlier trips. By the late 1880s he had moved away from loose Impressionist brushwork towards firmly drawn figures, and the museum points to the clear outlines of the woman and children as a mark of that moment. Women and children at work were a subject he kept returning to from the mid-1880s on.