Sam Salz Inc., New York (acquired from the artist)
Mr.꧑ and Mrs. Jo💫hn Hay Whitney (acquired from the above in 1952)

For this picture from 1938, Braque returned to a theme that had occupied him during the early part of his career: the beach.  At the beginning of the 20th century, the artist spent much of his time in the Riviera with Matisse, painting several Fauvist canvases of the seashore and the Mediterranean landscape.  But as he began to develop his Cubist aesthetic during 1907-08, he turned his attention towards still-lifes, eventually abandoning land🦩scape painting altogether for the next twenty years.  His interest in this subject reemerged around 1929, when he acquired a large cottage in Varengeville along the Normandy coast.  It was here that Braque would spend his summers and autumns until the end of his life, occasionally setting up his easel on the nearby beaches. The present work is one of the few compositions that he completed of the beach and depicts a site near Dieppe, a seafaring town in the vicinity of his home.  The artist’s palette is comprised predominantly of steely gray and other dark tones that convey the overcast weather that was typical of this region. 

Although he did not complete very many landscapes, those that he did demonstrate an approach to painting that was unseen in his canvases of other subjects.  In contrast to his highly abstracted, stylized still-lifes from this period, these landscapes were often more realistic in appearance, with easily identifiable objects and clearly defined shapes. Nevertheless, Braque does take liberties in depicting the spatial relationships among the elements of the compositiꦉon, noticeble here in the lower left quadrant where he has flattened and distorted the perspective.   Many of these compositions were rendered from memory and with the help of small sketches, and the resulting canvases were often composites of sites that he had seen during his daily strolls along the beach.