Around the Town

In 1883 Seurat was 24 and painting outdoors on panels small enough to carry in a coat pocket. This one is about 16 centimetres by 25, the size of a cigar-box lid, which is exactly what he used. He called these small oil sketches croquetons, and he made around 70 of them in his early years, letting the warm red-brown of the bare wood show through the strokes and do the work of a ground.

The dots have not arrived yet. The paint goes on here in short crossing strokes, quick and loose, much closer to the Impressionists he had been watching than to the speckled surfaces of a few years later. He was working his way through colour theory at the time, reading the chemist Chevreul on how neighbouring tones alter each other.

That same year he began his first large canvas, Bathers at Asnieres, a Sunday scene on the bank of the Seine north-west of Paris, prepared with panels exactly like this one.