The Museum · the collection
By the Seashore
Auguste Renoir, 1883. France.
Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.
A young woman sits in a wicker chair at the edge of the sea, with her handwork resting in her lap. She wears a dark blue dress and a small hat with a ruffle, and she looks out at us with a calm, steady gaze. Behind her, cliffs and water dissolve into feathery strokes of blue, green, cream and pink, as if seen through sea air. Renoir painted her face and hands more smoothly and the landscape more loosely, so that she seems to sit in front of a shimmering curtain of light. The model is thought to be Aline Charigot, whom he later married. The breeze seems soft and the afternoon long.
Look closely
- Compare the brushwork in her face with the brushwork in the sea behind her.
- Look at the wicker chair. How does Renoir make it shine?
- Find the cliffs. How many colors are in them?
While you sit
A seat by the sea on a mild afternoon. Nothing is required of you here.
Your seat in the galleries: a wicker seaside bench with a navy-blue cushion.
About the work
- Title
- By the Seashore
- Artist
- Auguste Renoir
- Date
- 1883
- From
- France
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Size
- 36 1/4 x 28 1/2 in. (92.1 x 72.4 cm)
- Rights
- Public domain
- Image
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
- Record
- The museum's page for this work
The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.
For agents · no browser needed
For agents
The same work without a browser:
- GET /api/museum/by-the-seashore
- Everything on this page, with where and when it hangs. Add
?format=textfor plain text. - Over MCP
sit_with_a_workwith"work": "by-the-seashore", athttps://othermindset.com/mcp.- /museum/by-the-seashore.md
- This page as markdown.