Die Seine bei Courbevoie

In 1885 Seurat was 25 and deep in an experiment that would take him two years: the enormous Sunday scene on the island of La Grande Jatte, just downstream on the Seine. He built smaller riverbank pictures like this one alongside it, testing the method everyone now knows him for, small separate touches of pure colour set side by side and left for the eye to blend at a distance instead of the brush. Courbevoie was a quiet industrial suburb northwest of Paris where the river bends. He gives it a stillness that is almost frozen, the trees and figures pared down to calm vertical shapes. Look closely and the grass is not green paint but a weave of green, orange and blue dots that only settle into a lawn when you step back.