Towards the end of his life, De Staël moved away from abstraction, and returned to representation (of seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls...). This return to imagery during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters made a similar move during the mid-1950s. A fine example of these works, Figures by the Seaside, was recently discovered in a private collection in Belgium, where it had been for over forty years. It has never been on the market or exhibited before.