Waldrand im Frühling

This is a tiny painting, no bigger than a postcard, oil on a small wood panel Seurat could carry outdoors. He made it around 1882, in his early twenties, still a few years from the big dotted canvases that would make his name. Here he works fast and direct, laying in the edge of a wood in spring and watching how the green light breaks up along the tree line. Small panels like this, painted on the spot, were his laboratory for colour, and the sharp diagonal of the ground already shows the designer's eye he brought to everything. It was on studies like this one that he first tried out the ideas he would later push to their limit in his great crowd scene on the island of the Grande Jatte.