Boat by the Bank, Asnières

In 1924 the Tate Gallery bought Seurat's huge Bathers at Asnières with money from a fund set up by Samuel Courtauld, the textile industrialist. That picture now hangs in the National Gallery. Courtauld also owned this small oil sketch, one of roughly 14 that Seurat painted by the Seine in 1883 while working out the big composition. It was not among the pictures he gave to the Courtauld Institute, which he founded in 1932, and it only joined them in 2000, bought at Sotheby's with help from the Art Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The sketch measures just 15 by 24 centimetres. A rowing boat with two tiny figures sits at the water's edge, a third figure stands on the bank above it, and the river in front is broken into short dabs of blue, green and pink. The Courtauld compares those dabs to the riverside pictures Monet and Renoir painted in the 1870s.