Landscape at Saint-Ouen

In 1878 the young man who painted this was about 19, and pointillism did not exist yet. Georges Seurat had not started the huge dotted canvases he is remembered for; La Grande Jatte was still years away. His friend Aman-Jean recalled him working on the spot here at Saint-Ouen, a plain industrial suburb north of Paris, on a panel small enough to hold in one hand. He let the bare wood show through the strokes, so the warm brown of the board itself becomes the light between the trees. This is the earliest of his outdoor oil studies that survives. For decades it was one face of a double-sided panel, split into two pictures only after 1950; the other side is now in Paris, at the Musée d'Orsay.