Bathers at Asnières (Study I)

In 1965 this little wooden board was lent to an exhibition in Chartres by Georges Renand, a director of La Samaritaine, the big Paris department store beside the Seine. It later belonged to the American collector Paul Mellon, who left it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington when he died in 1999, on condition that his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, could keep it for her lifetime. She died in 2014, and only then did it reach the museum, together with several other small Seurat panels from their collection. What it records is an afternoon on the riverbank at Asnières in 1883 or 1884, while Seurat was working out his large picture of bathers there. People sit on the grass with their backs to us, others stand waist-deep in the river, and at the right edge the white head of a horse rises out of the water.