Figuren in einer Landschaft

Seurat painted dozens of these little panels in the early 1880s, most of them no bigger than a postcard and many of them on the lid of a cigar box. He worked them outdoors along the Seine at Asnieres, a stretch of river just outside Paris where the factory chimneys of Clichy stood on one bank while clerks and workmen came out to sit on the other. The studies fed into Bathers at Asnieres, the very large canvas he finished in 1884 and showed with the newly formed independent artists after the official Salon turned it down. This one is about 25 centimetres across and dates from around 1883. It came to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2014.