From the early 1940s, the Australian artist Lloyd Rees would often take his family on holidays to the beach at Werri near Gerringong in the Illawarra district of New South Wales, and here produced some of his finest paintings. In several interviews, he mentioned an artistic debt to Claude Lorrain and to Paul Cezanne, and like his hero, he used a meditative approach to painting, observing details in a landscape over a long period of time.