Evening, Honfleur

Seurat spent the summer of 1886 at Honfleur, a harbour town on the Normandy coast, to, as he put it, wash the light of the studio out of his eyes. That same spring his enormous Sunday on La Grande Jatte had caused a stir in Paris, and he was deep in the reading of optics and colour theory. Here he lays the near-empty sky, sea and beach down in thousands of small separate dots, at least 25 distinct colours meant to mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the canvas. He even painted the frame in the same dots, letting the glow of the setting sun seem to spill past the picture's edge into the wood.