A River Bank (The Seine at Asnières)

In 1883 Asnières was a working suburb on the Seine just north-west of Paris, with factory chimneys along the river at Clichy and Parisians coming out on Sundays to swim and row. Seurat, then 23, spent that year drawing and painting along this stretch of water, the place where he would set his huge Bathers at Asnières. This panel is tiny, about 16 by 25 centimetres of wood. The National Gallery thinks it may belong to his earliest ideas for the Bathers, though it is not usually counted among the 13 sketches tied to that picture. The pieces are already arranged the way the big canvas arranges them. A striped pole stands upright on the left, the far bank runs across as a flat band, and the near bank cuts the water into a rough triangle. The river is laid in with long horizontal strokes. Down in the lower right corner, small dabs of pink, blue and yellow-green sit side by side, a few years before he settled on the dot technique he is known for. The panel came to London in 1995 as a gift from Heinz Berggruen, the Berlin-born dealer and collector.