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Manet took his family to Berck, on the Channel coast, for the summer of 1873, and painted his mother and his wife sitting out in the grass behind the dunes. Eugenie Manet is the one in black, Suzanne the one in white. Above them the swallows are flying low, which along that coast was read as rain on the way.

The next spring he sent the canvas to the Salon jury together with a second painting, a masked ball at the opera house. The jury refused both. That same April, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and others opened a show of their own in a photographer's studio on the boulevard des Capucines, the exhibition that got them the name Impressionists. They had asked Manet to join them.

He would not, and went on submitting to the Salon that had just turned him down. This painting had already found a buyer in Paris by then, before the jury ever saw it.