Der Gärtner

Before the tiny dots and the huge Sunday crowd of La Grande Jatte, Seurat spent the early 1880s on something quieter. In 1882 he was 22 and painting small wood panels of farm workers around Paris, outdoors and quickly, panels he called croquetons that fit inside the lid of his paint box. This one shows a gardener bent to his work, built from short strokes of bright, separated colour. Seurat was reading the American physicist Ogden Rood on how colours mix in the eye, and you can watch him testing that idea here, years before he turned it into a system. He would be dead at 31, so this counts as early work from a career that lasted barely a decade.