Final Study for "Bathers at Asnières"

In 1883 Asnieres was not a beauty spot. It was a suburb a short train ride from the Gare Saint-Lazare, where factory hands from Clichy came down to the Seine on a free afternoon, in sight of the chimneys they worked under. Seurat was 23 and spent that summer going out to the riverbank with small wooden panels and painting the bathers from life. He called these little boards his croquetons. This one measures about 16 by 25 centimetres and is the final study, the point at which the arrangement of figures was settled and only the size was left to change. The picture he built from it runs two metres by three, and when he sent it to the Paris Salon in 1884 the jury turned it down.