Low Tide, Yport

In April 1883 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel hung about 70 Renoirs in his rooms on the boulevard de la Madeleine in Paris, the first exhibition given over to the painter alone. Renoir was 42 and already uneasy about the loose handling that show was built on. He spent that summer working along the Channel coast, and Yport was one of the stops, a fishing village under the chalk cliffs west of Fecamp that had been taking in Paris holidaymakers for a generation. He painted it at low tide, when the sea pulls back a long way and leaves the boats sitting on wet flats. The slanting parallel strokes across that sand are the method he would spend the next few years arguing himself out of. Durand-Ruel bought the picture before 1891 and sold it to Robert Sterling Clark in March 1933.