Portrieux, The Bathing Cabins, Opus 185 (Beach of the Countess)

The beach in this picture is named after a woman who died more than 600 years before Signac painted it. Marguerite de Mayenne, a 13th-century viscountess, received this stretch of the Breton coast as a wedding gift in 1238, and the beach and the small island off it are still called after the Countess. By the summer of 1888, when Signac spent the season at Portrieux, the Plage de la Comtesse was a resort beach, lined with wooden bathing cabins since 1866. Old photographs of the place show people on the sand. Signac left them out. Infrared imaging of the canvas has found several figures roughly sketched on the beach underneath the paint, and none of them survived into the finished picture. Three people who live in the town today, reading the cabins' shadows, have each placed the scene in the middle or late afternoon.