Grandcamp, Evening

In the summer of 1885 Seurat left Paris for Grandcamp, a small fishing village on the Normandy coast, and spent the season painting the sea. He was 26, and back in the city he was at work on the huge Sunday scene of La Grande Jatte that would make his name. Here he was testing the method that made it possible, laying down separate small touches of colour and letting the eye mix them, an idea he took from the colour theory then being discussed in Paris. The sky and water are built from short horizontal strokes, the headland from denser dots. Years later he added the border around the edge, painted in the same broken dabs so no ordinary gold frame would fight the colours inside.