A Fisherman

In 1884 Seurat was spending long days on the banks of the Seine just outside Paris, painting quick oil sketches on small wooden panels that he called croquetons. This is one of them, barely 25 centimetres across. A man stands upright in a narrow boat on the river, and the whole scene is set down in short, separate touches of colour. The panel's early history runs through two people who were close to the painter. By 1891, the year Seurat died at 31, it probably belonged to Madeleine Knobloch, the young woman he lived with and kept from his family until his final days. It then passed to the critic Félix Fénéon, who had given the name Neo-Impressionism to Seurat's circle. In 1966 it reached Yale in the bequest of the New York collector Edith Wetmore.