Barbizon forest in autumn

Seurat was 22 in 1881, back in Paris after a year of military service at Brest, and he went out to Barbizon on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Painters had been working there for 50 years. Millet had died in the village six years earlier and Rousseau before him, and going there had become something between a motif and a pilgrimage. That same year the French edition of Ogden Rood's book on the science of colour was published in Paris, and Seurat read it. What he was doing in the forest was older and simpler than any theory: painting outdoors on little wooden boards he called croquetons. This one is about 16 by 25 centimetres, the size cut to slot into the lid of a paint box.