Der Kanal von Gravelines, Abend

Seurat painted this in the summer of 1890 at Gravelines, a small port near the Belgian border where the canal runs straight out to the sea. He made four views of the channel that season, working the same flat, quiet stretch of water at different hours. This is the evening one, emptied almost to bare essentials, a single mooring post leaning in the foreground and a few masts far off. Even the painted border of dots is his own, added so the picture would sit inside its own atmosphere rather than the wall's. It was his last summer of landscapes. The following March he fell suddenly ill and died in Paris at just 31, leaving the pointillist method he had spent a decade building barely carried on by anyone but himself.