Bathers at Asnières (Study II)

Five people share this small board, and only two of them made it into the big picture. Seurat painted it in 1883 or 1884 on a wooden panel about 15 by 25 centimetres, while he was trying out figures for Bathers at Asnières, his huge canvas of working men resting beside the Seine, also in the National Gallery. The man lying on the grass in the lower corner, in a white shirt, and the young man with his bare back to us at the water's edge both went through. The pale boy standing in the middle changed on the way, and in the final version he is standing waist-deep in the river. The rest were dropped. The figures are not even drawn to one scale, which gives the panel the feel of a page from a sketchbook.