By the Seashore
A young woman in a wicker chair, with a breezy coast behind her worked up from sketches Renoir made on Guernsey.
Saint Peter Port
The painting depicts a real landscape or cityscape. The precise viewpoint the artist used may be unknown, so the marker shows the general area.
By the Seashore — at a glance
- Artist
- Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
- Year
- 1883
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Place
- Coastal background based on Guernsey, Channel Islands
- Viewpoint
- A studio-posed figure against a coast worked up from Guernsey sketches — not painted on the spot
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 92 × 72 cm
- Now at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Overview
By the Seashore is a single-figure picture by Auguste Renoir from 1883, a period when he was tightening his drawing after a trip to Italy. A young woman in a blue-trimmed dress and a straw hat sits sideways in a wicker garden chair, gloved hands loosely clasped, looking off to the side; behind her, out of focus, a bright coast of blue-green sea, rocks and a low cliff under a windy sky. It is oil on canvas, about 92 by 72 cm, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Where was By the Seashore painted?
Museum interpretation In September 1883 Renoir spent about a month on Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, and painted the bays and rocky shores, especially around Moulin Huet. Those studies supplied the loosely brushed coastal background here; the figure herself was posed in the studio in Paris. So the sea and rocks are based on a real place — the Guernsey coast, which survives and is walkable — but the picture is a studio composition, not a view painted on the spot.
What is in the painting?
The woman fills the left and centre, sharply painted: the striped and blue-trimmed dress, the straw hat, the red-brown hair, the pale gloved hands. Behind her, painted much more freely, blue and green water, a scatter of rocks, a strip of sandy or grassy shore and a hazy headland, with wind in the loose brushwork.
Look closely
The two handlings
The woman is crisply drawn and modelled; the sea behind is rapid, feathery Impressionist brushwork.
The wicker chair
She sits sideways in a garden chair, gloved hands loosely clasped — a studio prop.
The Guernsey coast
Blue-green water, scattered rocks and a hazy headland, based on Renoir's Moulin Huet studies.
Analysis
Composition and technique
A crisply drawn seated figure set against a soft, sketch-like coast — two different handlings in one picture.
Scholarship Renoir contrasts the firm contours and careful modelling of the woman — his new, more ‘classical’ manner — with the rapid, feathery Impressionist strokes of the sea behind, so the sitter reads as solid and present and the setting as air and light.
History & provenance
The painting entered the Havemeyer collection and came with it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — collection entry for Auguste Renoir, ‘By the Seashore’ (1883; oil on canvas, c. 92 × 72 cm; Havemeyer Collection)
- Colin B. Bailey, ‘Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting’ (Frick Collection, 2012)
Related paintings
More by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Luncheon of the Boating Party
