Houses at the seaside

Degas is remembered for dancers, racehorses, and lamplit interiors, so this quiet stretch of the Normandy coast comes as a surprise. In the summer of 1869 he spent time on the Channel shore near Etretat and made a group of small pastel landscapes, most of them worked up from memory rather than in front of the view. There is almost nothing in it: a low band of houses on a rise, a wide pale sky, muted greens and browns. It feels remembered rather than observed, softened as if through haze. This was the summer before the Franco-Prussian War broke over France, when Degas would enlist in the defence of Paris.