Peasant Girls bathing in the Sea at Dusk

Degas meant to show this picture in public twice, and twice he pulled it. It is listed in the catalogues of the second and third Impressionist exhibitions in Paris, in 1876 and 1877. Both times he withdrew it at the last moment. It stayed in his studio, unfinished, and he kept reworking it. Three naked girls run into the surf toward a red setting sun, holding hands in a line. The paint around their legs is dragged and broken like spray. Behind them the canvas crowds in other scenes from the beach, people resting and a maid combing a girl's hair, a motif Degas took from Japanese prints. Far out at sea a sailing boat passes a steamer trailing smoke. The painting is on loan to the National Gallery from a private collection. Paul Gauguin later answered it with a picture of his own, Women Bathing.