Painted along France's Brittany coast, the present work explores Prendergast's signature theme of crowds by the sea using new techniques. The artist had sailed to Paris in 1907, where he was profoundly impacted by the works of French artists including Matisse and Cézanne. When he continued on to the coast that summer, he created a series of works applying the new ideas he had encountered while in Paris to familiar subject matter.

As scholar Nancy Mowll Mathews has observed:

When [Prendergast] went out to the coast the full impact of the new ideas exploded into the extraordinary oils and watercolors of the Saint-Malo shoreline. Using his innate color sense and his new appreciation of the energy of broken planes arranged in horizontal bands from the top to the bottom of the canvas, Prendergast was able to create a new reality out of his old familiar theme.*

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* "Prendergast: Change and Sea-Change," in Joachim Homann, Maurice Prendergast by the Sea (New York and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013), pp. 25-26.