Marine, Guernsey

Renoir spent September 1883 on Guernsey, and many of the pictures he made there are full of bathers on the rocks. This one has nobody in it. It is the sea running in among boulders, a row of rocky headlands catching the light further out, and a sky laid down in long slanting strokes. Before it reached a museum, the canvas belonged to Max Kaganovitch, a Paris art dealer born in Ukraine who closed his gallery on the boulevard Raspail in 1968. In 1973 he and his wife Rosy gave their collection to the French state, and this seascape went with it to the Jeu de Paume, then the Louvre's gallery for Impressionist painting. In May 1978 the collection travelled to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and then to the Hermitage in Leningrad, opening about six weeks after Kaganovitch had died.