On the beach

Manet painted this over three weeks in the summer of 1873, on a family holiday at Berck-sur-Mer on the northern French coast. The two figures are his wife Suzanne, wrapped up against the wind and reading, and his younger brother Eugène, stretched out and staring at the sea. Manet worked so directly on the spot that grains of the beach are still stuck in the paint. It is a small, quick, almost private picture, closer to a snapshot than to the large scenes he showed at the Salon. Eugène, lying there in the sand, was about to marry the painter Berthe Morisot, who had modelled for Manet for years and would become one of the leading figures of the Impressionist group.