Titles

Possible titles have been suggested:

• Possibly 'Sea and Storm; grey and green' or 'Sands; blue note' (1884, Dowdeswell). 1
• 'The Sea and Sand' (1980, YMSM). 2

Since Whistler's original title is not known for certain, 'The Sea and Sand' is the preferred title.

Description

A beach scene in horizontal format. A few figures, including small children, stand in the lower right foreground, and several further away, looking across the broad beach to a stormy sea with waves breaking on the shore, under a lowering grey sky.

Site

This was painted in St Ives, Cornwall, in south-west England, between January and March 1884. Anna Greutzner Robins suggests that it is a distant view of a small section of Porthmeor Beach, and that Whistler must have viewed it through a telescope with a camera obscura from the only available viewpoint, the gasworks. 3 She adds that it appears to have been painted from the top down, which might confirm that he was viewing an inverted image of the scene. This is an intriguing possibility, although there is no actual record of Whistler using such an ocular aid. Furthermore, given the extreme simplicity of the view, it is not possible to be completely sure which beach is represented, and what was the viewpoint.