Landscape with Puvis de Chavannes' Poor Fisherman

In 1881 Puvis de Chavannes showed a bare, melancholy picture called The Poor Fisherman at the Paris Salon, and the critics were rough on it. Younger painters felt the opposite. Georges Seurat, still in his early twenties and years away from the dotted technique that would make his name, was among those it moved. He took a small wooden panel he had already used for a landscape at Saint-Ouen, and over part of the surface he painted his own quiet copy of Puvis's fisherman. The earlier scene, a house and a flowering tree, is still visible off to the left. The whole thing is barely larger than a sheet of paper.