View of the Seacoast near Wargemont in Normandy

Renoir spent part of the summer of 1880 at Wargemont, a country house on the cliffs east of Dieppe that belonged to Paul Berard, a banker and former diplomat who had begun buying his work the year before. The timing was lucky. Renoir had stopped showing with the Impressionists and was sending pictures to the official Salon instead, which his old colleagues took badly and which brought him the portrait commissions he lived on. At Wargemont he painted the family, the house and stretches of coast like this one, working out of doors and quickly, before the light moved. Monet came to the same chalk coast in the early 1880s and painted the cliffs at Varengeville, a short way along on the other side of Dieppe.