About this work
Two small children dig in the sand with pails and shovels — that is the entirety of the scene, and Cassatt needs nothing more. She tightly cropped the composition, tilted the picture plane forward, and reduced the number of objects in the background to draw attention to the two little girls. The effect is immediate and intimate, as though you've crouched down to their level. The intent expression on one child's face, the lowered angles of their heads, and the set of their shoulders suggest complete concentration on their activity.
Various shades of blue dominate the palette while accents of white convey sunlight bouncing off the girls' dresses, hats, and pails. The background is built from flat, horizontal bands of color, while the children and their buckets are formed of circles and rounded shapes — the background colors cool and receding, the children warm in their rosy flesh and bright clothing.
One girl wears a wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with a tomato-red ribbon; her face is hidden by its brim, her outstretched legs in olive-green stockings, her near hand reaching across her lap toward a pail.
The beach meets pale blue and aquamarine ocean in the upper third of the canvas, with loosely painted daubs along the shoreline and two white sailboats dissolving into the horizon.
The painting was created in 1884 , the year after Cassatt had accompanied her ailing mother to Spain to seek the recuperative effects of the seaside climate; the painting is generally believed to have been made after their return.
Coastal scenes were popular among her Impressionist contemporaries, but Cassatt rarely ventured into the genre — which makes this work singular within her oeuvre.
By the time she exhibited it at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, her reputation as a tender yet unsentimental painter of children had been firmly established.
Her deepening interest in Japanese prints — visible in much of her work after 1883 — is legible here too : the influence shows in the tight cropping, the tilted picture plane, and the reduction of background detail, all of which pull the eye directly to the girls.
Although completed in the studio — X-radiograph studies reveal Cassatt reworked almost every area of the canvas — the painting nonetheless conveys a sense of spontaneity and freshness.
This is a painting that rewards a room with natural light, where the blues of the ocean can shift across the day the way they do at the actual shore. It belongs equally in a
