Nude Boys on the Rocks at Guernsey

In September 1883 Renoir spent about a month on Guernsey, a Channel Island under the British crown where most people still spoke French. What struck him first was the bathing. He wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel that on the beach at Moulin Huet there were no bathing huts at all, so people changed among the rocks, women and men crowded together, and that nothing in France would have been allowed to look like that. Seaside etiquette across the water in England ran to wheeled bathing machines and separate stretches of sand for each sex. Renoir made roughly 15 pictures on the island that autumn, nearly all of them of that one small bay, and four of the landscapes went to Durand-Ruel before the year was out.