Der Kanal von Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe

In the summer of 1890 Seurat travelled to Gravelines, a quiet port near the Belgian border, and painted four calm views of its channel. This is one of them, among the last landscapes he ever made. He built the whole scene from thousands of small separate dots of colour, placed by rule so they mix in the eye into a still, silvery light, and he even added a narrow border of darker dots around the edge to make the daylight inside glow more. There are no fishermen and no holidaymakers, only mooring posts, a lighthouse and empty water. A few months later, early in 1891, Seurat died suddenly at the age of 31, his method of painting by dots barely a decade old and still fiercely argued over.