Sonntag in Port-en-Bessin

In the summer of 1888 Georges Seurat left the studio arguments of Paris behind and went to the Normandy coast, to the little fishing port of Port-en-Bessin. He spent that season painting the harbour over and over, from different sides and at high and low tide, six canvases in all, this among them. Look at the flags and pennants strung along the quay. That flutter of colour is unusually cheerful for Seurat, whose seascapes tend toward stillness and grey. He built the whole scene from tiny separate dots of pure colour, trusting your eye to blend them, following the colour theories then circulating from the chemist Chevreul. Seurat kept these summers by the sea for the rest of his short life. He was dead by 31, only three years after finishing this.