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Children on the Seashore, Guernsey, 1883?, Auguste Renoir
The way into blessed freedom may be not to live in too great a dependence on the passage of time, on the inexorable approach of tomorrow and mortality. The sense of joy in Renoir’s Children on the Seashore seems to flow from the timelessness of their experience. It is not a real world, with its softly coloured pastel background made up of a blur of bathers, and with the children themselves half melted into their context of colour. They are responsive only to the immediacy of their sun-filled leisure. We feel that this holiday will be recalled, in the future, as joy, though perhaps not yet fully realized as such.
