Beach Scene

Auguste Renoir

1883 · Pen and brown ink with watercolor wash on buff paper, darkened · Robert Lehman Collection

This tiny watercolor was made on the southeast coast of Guernsey, an island in the English Channel. Renoir took great delight in Guernsey, as he remarked in a letter to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. There is “no better sight than this mixture of women and men crowded together on these rocks. You would think you were in a landscape by Watteau rather than in real life. I will therefore have a source of real, graceful subjects of which I’ll be able to make use.”

Artist

Auguste Renoir

Date

1883

Medium

Pen and brown ink with watercolor wash on buff paper, darkened

Department

Robert Lehman Collection

Credit line

Robert Lehman Collection, 1975