大海与悬崖

In the mid-1880s Renoir was working against his own habits. He had come back from Italy in 1882 having studied Raphael's frescoes in Rome and the wall paintings from Pompeii, and he spent the next few years putting hard outlines and cool, smooth flesh into large figure pieces like The Large Bathers, which took him three years. He told his dealer Ambroise Vollard later that around then he felt he had come to the end of Impressionism and could no longer paint or draw. Coast studies like this one stayed loose while all of that was going on. The Metropolitan dates it only to about 1885, since Renoir left no date on the canvas and no record of which stretch of coast it is.