Bathers at Asnières (Study III)

Asnieres in 1883 was no beauty spot. It was a stretch of the Seine just outside Paris, below the factories of Clichy, where working men swam on their day off. Seurat spent that summer going out there with small wooden panels that fitted inside the lid of his paint box, painting on the spot. He called them croquetons. This one is 16 by 25 centimetres and shows a boy washing a black horse in the river, with the bridge and the factory chimneys behind him. He made about 13 such panels and 10 drawings before building the two-metre canvas in his studio, Bathers at Asnieres, which the Salon rejected in 1884 and which now hangs in London. The horse never appeared in the finished painting.