Low Tide at Grandcamp

Seurat spent the summer of 1885 on the Channel coast at Grandcamp, a small fishing harbour in Normandy, and painted the quiet water at low tide. Back in his Paris studio waited an enormous canvas, the Sunday crowd on the island of La Grande Jatte, which he had been building for more than a year. These seaside pictures were where he tried out his method in the open air: colour set down in separate small touches, left to mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. What he worked out that summer he carried back to the studio, reworking the big painting touch by touch before he showed it the next spring. On this beach the effect is calm and almost bare, a wide grey channel of water under a high pale sky.