Description:
Marie-Paule (Pauline) Carpentier (1876-1915) was a French painter and draughtswoman. She worked in oil and watercolor. She painted landscapes, nudes and figurative compositions. From 1899 she exhibited at the Paris Salons. In 1912, a solo exhibition of her work was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris.

Description of the painting:
“On the Beach” was presented at the 1910 Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. It was probably there that Edward Alexander Raczynski noticed and purchased it for his collection. The Rogalin work is referred to as a sketch for the later work, one year later, entitled “Les chardons bleus”**.

The watercolor presents a seated figure of a nude woman. She holds a piece of red fabric in her hands, which she touches with tenderness, almost piety, concentrating all her attention on it. The clearly outlined lines of her body seem to break away from the horizontal bands of sandy dunes spreading in the distance.

The artist often juxtaposes female figures and the nature surrounding them, the boundless stretches of sandy dunes or water surfaces. This reinforces the impression of the helplessness of the portrayed against the power and immensity of the surrounding space. It is worth noting that in the frames captured by the artist, the heads of the models are bowed, their faces remain turned away, “invisible”. All the viewer’s attention is focused on the female body and the context in which it is presented.