End of the pier, Honfleur

In the summer of 1886 Seurat left Paris for the Channel port of Honfleur and worked up six views of its harbour at once, painting the water, the jetties and the wide coastal light in his method of small separate dots of colour meant to blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. He was 26, and that spring he had just shown the enormous Sunday on La Grande Jatte at the last Impressionist exhibition, the painting that announced this dot-by-dot technique to a startled public. These quiet seaside canvases were where he tried it out on open air and moving water. This one became the first Seurat the collector Helene Kroller-Muller ever bought, years later, and it led her to acquire several more.