Landscape, Seated Man, Study for La Grande Jatte

Seurat painted this little wooden panel in 1884 or 1885, while his big picture of a Sunday crowd on the island of La Grande Jatte, in the Seine near Paris, was taking shape in the studio. The river runs as a band across the top, laid in with dabs of blue and pink to catch the shine on the water. Below it is the grassy bank, and on it one man, sitting alone. In the finished canvas, now in Chicago, that stretch of grass is full of people. Here Seurat was working out where a single figure should go, and it did not come right at the first attempt. Dark shapes under the paint seem to show that he tried other positions before he settled on this one. In 1900, nine years after his death, the panel was shown in Paris beside the finished Grande Jatte, at the first large retrospective of his work.