By the Seashore

By the Seashore is an oil on canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, completed in 1883 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which received it in 1929 with the H. O. Havemeyer Collection.

The picture comes from the years just after Renoir's journey to Italy in 1881–82, where the art of the Renaissance made a deep impression on him. On his return he began to move away from Impressionism, giving more weight to contour and modelling and dropping the principle that a scene had to be painted outdoors to catch light and atmosphere. Late in the summer of 1883 he spent about a month at St Peter Port on Guernsey, where he started some fifteen pictures, most of them finished later in his Paris studio. By the Seashore, however, is thought to have been painted in the studio, and the beach is probably not in the Channel Islands but near Dieppe on the Normandy coast.

The model was Aline Charigot, Renoir's companion at the time, whom he married in 1890. She sits in a wicker armchair in a dark blue dress with white frills at the collar, a bonnet on her head and needlework in her hands. Her face and hands are carefully modelled, while the sea, sand and cliffs behind her are brushed in loosely, so that figure and landscape seem to occupy different spaces, a discrepancy of scale and space that Renoir was exploring in these years.

According to the provenance summarised on Russian Wikipedia, the dealer Durand-Ruel bought the canvas from Renoir in January 1884 under the title Young Woman Knitting by the Sea. Henry Osborne and Louisine Havemeyer acquired it in 1899, and Louisine Havemeyer's bequest brought it to the Metropolitan. It measures 92.1 × 72.4 cm.