Man Painting a Boat

Seurat died in Paris in March 1891, and on 3 May his friends met in his studio to sort out what he had left. With his family were two painters, Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, and the critic Félix Fénéon. They listed the pictures and divided them up. This small panel went first to his mother. Later it passed to Fénéon, the writer who in 1886 gave the name Neo-Impressionism to the new way of painting Seurat had worked out.

It dates from around 1883, before any of the famous dots. A workman in a straw hat and dark jacket bends over a boat hull propped on the riverbank, with a white post and a row of stakes behind him. The Courtauld links the cool colours and quick criss-cross strokes to Manet. Samuel Courtauld, the textile industrialist, bought the panel in 1928.