House among Trees

In 1883 the Paris Salon accepted a work by Seurat for the first time: a conté crayon drawing of his friend, the painter Aman-Jean. Seurat was 23. That was the official side of the year. The rest of it he spent outdoors with panels like this one.

Early in his career he made about 70 of these small oil studies and called them croquetons. They were cigar-box lids, roughly 16 by 25 centimetres, cheap and stiff, easy to hold in one hand and carry out to a field, and the red-brown wood gave him a warm ground to work against. The subject here is a house in trees, an ordinary bit of country rather than a view worth travelling for.

Through the same months he was building the big canvas that grew out of this habit, Bathers at Asnières, which the Salon turned down the following year.