The Great Painters and the Beach

The Great Painters and the Beach

The best beaches in art, some of which you can actually visit,

others which must be journeyed to via the mind’s eye....

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach (detail)1909Oil on canvas, 205 × 200 cm Museo Sorolla, Madrid

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cmNational Gallery, London

MONET, ClaudeCamille on the Beach at Trouville1870Oil on canvas,  38.1 x 46.4 cm  Yale University Art Gallery

MONET, ClaudeCamille on the Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas,  38.1 x 46.4 cm  Yale University Art Gallery

MONET, ClaudeCamille on the Beach at Trouville (detail)1870Oil on canvas,  38.1 x 46.4 cm  Yale University Art Gallery

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach (detail)1873Oil on canvas, 60 x 74 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

BOUDIN, EugèneOn the Beach, Trouville1887Oil on wood  ,  18.4 x 32.7 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington

BOUDIN, EugèneOn the Beach, Trouville (detail)1887Oil on wood  ,  18.4 x 32.7 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington

BOUDIN, EugèneOn the Beach, Trouville (detail)1887Oil on wood  ,  18.4 x 32.7 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington

BOUDIN, EugèneOn the Beach, Trouville (detail)1887Oil on wood  ,  18.4 x 32.7 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach (detail)1876Thinned oil on paper on canvas, 46 x 81 cmNational Gallery, London

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach (detail)1891Oil on canvas, 69 x 91 cmMusée d'Orsay, Paris

PICASSO, PabloTwo women running on the beach. (The race)1922 Gouache on plywood, 32x41cmMusée National Picasso, Paris

PICASSO, PabloTwo women running on the beach. (The race)(detail)1922 Gouache on plywood, 32x41cmMusée National Picasso, Paris

PICASSO, PabloTwo women running on the beach. (The race)(detail)1922 Gouache on plywood, 32x41cmMusée National Picasso, Paris

PICASSO, PabloTwo women running on the beach. (The race)(detail)1922 Gouache on plywood, 32x41cmMusée National Picasso, Paris

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro) (detail)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro) (detail)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro) (detail)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro) (detail)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro) (detail)1906Oil on canvas,  66.3 x 188.5 cm  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Great Painters and the Beach

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SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínLighthouse walk at Biarritz (Paseo del faro)

In 1906, Sorolla and his family visited the northern Spanish Biarritz.

In group portrait Paseo de Faro it shows several women during a walk along the cliffs above the beach. The painter shows here the beach and washed around by underwater rock formation as a background motive. In front of the frieze-like image that women are loosely arranged side by side.

Again, the white clothes dominates the scene, only the young girl in the center is granted as an outcry a flashy red jacket. Large hats and umbrellas are important props also in this walk.

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, JoaquínWalk on the beach

Painted during the summer of 1909 at the beach in Valencia, after Sorolla’s triumphant success in the United States, Strolling along the Seashore is undoubtedly one of the artist’s most important works.

The water and the sandy seashore, depicted here in long blue, purple and turquoise brushstrokes, become an abstract backdrop for the refined figures of the artist’s wife and daughter Maria. The suggestion of the breeze in their floating draperies intensifies the fleeting moment captured here by the artist, along with the use of a clearly photographic frame which cuts through Clotilde’s wide-brimmed straw hat and leaves an empty swathe of sand in the lower foreground.

Although this is the same setting as in other Valencia seashore scenes, the tone here is very different. What we see here is a perfect example of the iconographic genre of the ‘elegant promenade’ with well-dressed bourgeois figures strolling along the seashore.

MONET, ClaudeThe Beach at Trouville

Wind and sand get in eyes when you look at this astonishingly immediate painterly snapshot of a moment at the seaside.

This is a masterpiece of impressionism, and when it was painted its fast, natural, flowing perceptions were utterly removed from what people expected a painting to look like.

The figure to the left is probably Monet's wife Camille, and the woman on the right may be the wife of Eugène Boudin.

MONET, ClaudeCamille on the Beach at Trouville

What list of beaches in art would be complete without a nod to the impressionists? You can still visit this Normandy beach but a close look at Monet’s canvas will offer you a glimpse of its sands anyway, as grains were swept onto the artwork by the wind during its composition.

This painting is one of five beach scenes produced by Monet in the summer of 1870. It’s a poignant reminder of the impressionist’s ability to successfully capture a single moment: looking at it you can almost smell the salt air, feel the flecks of ocean in the sea breeze, and hear that wave as it is about to crash onto the shore.

The depicted figure, face somewhat obscured by a veil, is Monet’s wife, Camille, who despite her relaxed posture lends an air of tension to an otherwise carefree scene.

MANET, EdouardOn the Beach

Manet painted this canvas in the summer of 1873, during three weeks spent with his family in the little coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer. He had his wife and his brother pose for him on the beach as is shown by the grains of sand mixed with the paint. Suzanne, well protected against the sun and the wind by a muslin veil and a voluminous summer dress, is absorbed in her book.

Eugène, the painter's brother is gazing out to sea, lying in the same position as ten years earlier in Lunch on the Grass.

The variations in the colour of the sea from dark ultramarine blue to emerald green are rendered by a gradation of strips of horizontal colour building up to a powerful crescendo. The result is a lack of depth and a flattened effect.

BOUDIN, EugèneOn the Beach, Trouville

The skill at seizing the ephemeral and noting essentials characterize the views of Trouville painted by Boudin. Trouville was a fashionable resort under the Second Empire.

Boudin, the son of a Honfleur sailor, spent most of his life in seaside towns and concentrated on painting landscapes by the sea, everyday coastal scenes.

The pictures he painted over the years in his loose, sketchy way did not, strictly speaking, possess any central subjects. Even his market or beach scenes present an extensive panorama of colour and economically deployed line accentuation.

The atmosphere is bright, moist and highly sensitively registered.

DEGAS, EdgarAt the Beach

In contrast to his impressionist contemporaries, Degas chose to forego the uncomfortable setting of the outdoors favored by the ‘plein-air’ painters, choosing instead to paint this beach in his studio, which is perhaps what lends this scene its somewhat unreal aura.

Instead of conveying spontaneity and immediacy, this painting looks staged, and is clearly the product of prolonged reflection.

GAUGUIN, PaulTahitian Women on the Beach

Paul Gaugin embark in 1891 for his decisive journey to Polynesian waters, sailing towards a new life, hoped to be primitive and paradisiac. Anchoring in Tahiti, paul Gaugin wishes “to live there in ecstasy, calm and art”.

This composition is typical of his paintings during the early part of his first stay in the Pacific, paintings often depicting Tahitian women busy with simple daily tasks. The faces are rendered as a mask or a profile, rather indeterminate, but full of melancholy.

The painting is lightly animated both by the discreet, almost monochrome, still life in the foreground, and by the rollers breaking on the lagoon in the background, suggested by a few white highlights.

PICASSO, PabloTwo women running on the beach. (The race)

No artist has ever felt and guided the pulse of his times as precisely as Picasso. In an art that often seems intensely private and in styles that appear to follow no rule but originality, he also manages to sum up social changes as they happen.

This grand and generously classical image perfectly portrays the new freedom claimed by women after the first world war – a new age of gender relations that Picasso clearly welcomes – in a moment of fun and ecstasy by the sea.