In 1854 Corot visited Holland with the artist Constant Dutilleux, who wrote: ‘We make for the sea, 1st study in the dunes with Scheveningen in the background’. Corot later used his Dutch sketches for larger salon paintings that he called ‘souvenirs’. His studies of Scheveningen were much admired by fellow artists, including Antoine Vollon who may have owned this painting. In 1883 Vincent Van Gogh wrote: ‘Going back … thirty years, forty, even fifty years [Corot and Daubigny] began to paint the dunes [of Scheveningen] in their true character … where the soil is almost untrodden by bathing guests’.