A la orilla del mar

Anna Bilinska was a Polish painter carving out a career in Paris in the 1880s, a hard thing for a woman then, when the main art schools still barred women from the life class. In the summers of 1885 and 1886 she left the city for Pourville, a fishing village on the Normandy coast. This picture comes from those holidays. A young woman from the village sits on the sand with her small daughter, a hoop net resting beside them, and sailing boats far out on a flat grey sea. Bilinska keeps almost everything in tones of grey, plain and unsentimental. She painted it on cardboard rather than canvas. It is now in the National Museum in Warsaw.