Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of the previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet.

Despite its small format, this warm coastal scene captures a wide-angled view of the bay at Cagnes-sur-Mer. The scene is sweeping deeply into the background, where small white buildings can just be seen.

The artist had moved to the Mediterranean in 1907. X-rays reveal, though, that Renoir had originally intended the canvas for a landscape with a close-up view of houses on the right.

This painting originally belonged to the art dealer Margraf & Co, a company owned by the Jewish couple Rosa and Jakob Oppenheimer. The picture later came into the possession of the Jewish chemical engineer Leopold Moller. Moller fled from the Nazi regime to England in 1939 and managed to bring the Renoir and two other paintings with him - unframed, in his suitcase, convincing customs that they were not original works of art.