Enfants au bord de la mer, Guernesey

Renoir spent about a month on Guernsey in the late summer of 1883 and came away with roughly 15 pictures, most of them made at Moulin Huet, a small bay on the island's south coast. He wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel about what he was seeing. Women and men lay together on the rocks, he said, and it looked more like a landscape by Watteau than like real life. Bathing that freely mixed was still unusual back in France. The finished canvas went to Boston in 1948 in a collector's bequest. It was never painted on the beach at all: he worked it up later in his Paris studio from the studies he had carried home, and the right-hand and upper edges are still left loose and unfinished.