Young Girls on the Edge of the Sea

Young Girls on the Edge of the Sea of 1879, held at the Musée d'Orsay, is among the most widely reproduced of all Puvis de Chavannes's canvases and a key work in the prehistory of Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. The composition presents three female figures on a bare shoreline — standing, crouching, and seated — whose poses derive from classical sculpture while the setting is entirely stripped of archaeological specificity. The figures exist outside time, on a shore that is simultaneously Mediterranean antiquity and modern France, their bodies pale as marble against a grey-blue sea. Gauguin was deeply influenced by this canvas; it shaped his vision of a pre-modern paradise populated by figures of timeless physical and spiritual beauty. Seurat included a reproduction of it in his studio. The painting's influence on the generation of 1880–1900 makes it one of the most consequential works in French Romantic painting.

Puvis achieved the painting's celebrated pallor by building up the flesh tones in layers of near-white with minimal warm undertone, then setting the figures against a sea of only slightly deeper grey-blue value. The tonal difference between figure and ground is minimal, creating a hovering, weightless effect unusual in figure painting.