Boy Sitting in a Meadow

In the early 1880s the painter everyone in Paris talked about for country life was Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose peasants stood alone in wide fields, painted with close, almost photographic care. Seurat, then in his early twenties, was paying attention. Glasgow's curators see that debt in this boy, and the city happens to own the comparison as well. Bastien-Lepage's Poor Fauvette of 1881, a girl minding a cow on a bare winter hillside, is also in its collection. Seurat's boy may be a cowherd too. Look to the top left and a brown cow is grazing at the far edge of the meadow, while he sits with his head down and pays it no attention, a dark, heavy figure in a field of sunlit yellow-green. The canvas came to Glasgow in 1950, given by the trustees of David Cargill, a Scottish collector of French painting.