Bridge of Courbevoie

By the late 1880s the Seine just north of Paris was filling up with factories, and Courbevoie was one of those in-between places where the city thinned into industry. Seurat set up here in 1887, in his late 20s, and painted the river bank with a method he had worked out only a few years earlier: thousands of small separate touches of colour, laid side by side so your eye does the mixing. Everything holds unnaturally still. A moored boat, a thin chimney trailing smoke, a few figures who do not seem to move or speak. The bare tree on the right stood on that bank, and he kept it leafless even though he was working through the summer.