Pferd und Boote (Studie zu Baden in Asnières)

Asnieres in 1883 was where Paris kept the things it preferred not to look at. Factories and gasworks lined the far bank towards Clichy, barges worked the river, and on Sundays clerks and labourers came out from the city to sit by the water.

Seurat was 23 and spent that season going back to the same stretch of bank with small wooden panels, painting quickly on the spot before committing himself to a canvas almost 3 metres wide. This is one of those panels. A working horse and moored boats, the river doing its day job, which is the half of Asnieres that stays visible behind the bathers in the finished picture.

When he sent that picture to the Salon in 1884 it was refused, and it went instead into the first exhibition of the independent artists' group that formed in Paris that spring.