Children on the Beach (Watching the Tide Go Out; Watching the Boats)

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), the American painter, made Children on the Beach, also exhibited as Watching the Tide Go Out and as Watching the Boats. It is an oil on canvas, 32.1 by 41.9 centimetres (12 5/8 by 16 1/2 inches). Young boys sit on an overturned dory and look out at sailboats scattered across a harbour, with hills beyond, a rocky outcrop behind the boat and another figure in the foreground.

Sotheby's catalogues the painting as made in 1873, in a summer Homer spent in Gloucester. Its first recorded exhibition was in Chicago in 1881. Sotheby's also says the canvas was cut down and lined in 1938, and that an x-ray shows another painting beneath.

It was sold at Sotheby's New York on 10 November 2014, as lot 36 in Property from the Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon: Masterworks, against an estimate of $3,000,000–5,000,000. Judd Tully and TribLIVE both reported a price of $4,533,000; neither states whether it includes the buyer's premium.

The provenance begins with James H. Dole of Chicago, probably in 1882–83. It then passed through the Brooklyn Museum in 1912, and through Mr. and Mrs. Norman B. Woolworth in 1952, before Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon acquired it in May 1971.