Gravelines Channel

In the summer of 1890 Georges Seurat went north to Gravelines, a quiet port near the Belgian border, and worked on its channel through the season, making four canvases of it. He was 30 and at the top of his exacting powers, with no way to know these would be among his final paintings. He died the next spring, probably of an infection, not yet 32. He built the whole scene from separate dabs of unmixed colour set side by side and left the blending to the eye, the patient method he called divisionism. What that method found at Gravelines is a channel nearly emptied of people, flat pale water, a mooring post, and a thin quay running back into a wide quiet sky.