Edward Darley Boit, nicknamed Ned, was born in Boston and lived in Newport, Rhode Island from 1864 to 1871. He was a Harvard-trained lawyer who went on to pursue painting, concentrating in Impressionist watercolors of the European countryside. He and his wife Mary Louisa Cushing Boit moved to Europe using her inheritance, where they lived in Italy and France. While in Paris, he studied with Thomas Couture and François-Louis Français and exhibited at the Paris Salon in the 1870s and 1880s. He also befriended painter John Singer Sargent, and the 1882 Singer Sargent painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is now a part of the permanent collection in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He spent all his adult life going back and forth between Europe and the Boston area, and he died in Rome around 1915.

Biarritz is a small scenic town on the coast of France that gained popularity as a vacation spot for the wealthy during the mid 1800s. Both its natural beauty and its reputation for being a destination of the well-off make it a prime example of Boit's work. Biarritz and Coastal Seascape were donated to the Permanent Collection by Richard and Sandra Bornstein.