Fields with trees in Barbizon

Before Georges Seurat invented the dotted technique he is remembered for, he was a young painter learning from the generation just ahead of him. In the early 1880s he worked around Barbizon, the village at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest where Jean-Francois Millet and other landscape painters had settled to paint straight from nature, out of the studio. This is one of those early studies: trees and an open field, built up from soft tones rather than the tiny points of colour he would soon become known for. It is a small, plain patch of French countryside, made while Seurat was still absorbing the Barbizon habit of looking hard and patiently at light on the land.