Beach at Gravelines

Seurat spent the summer of 1890 at Gravelines, a quiet harbour town on the northern French coast near the Belgian border. He was 30, methodical, known for building large paintings out of thousands of tiny separate dots of colour. This little panel is another matter. It is barely bigger than a sheet of paper, and it was not a study for anything, made instead just for the pleasure of it, out on the beach. Conservators have found grains of sand caught in the paint, proof it was worked in the open air. The sea and sky are pared down to almost nothing, a thin band of orange marking where they meet. It was the last summer he would paint; he died the following spring, at 31.