Massive Figure in a Landscape

Around 1882 Georges Seurat, then in his early twenties, spent his days painting out of doors in the countryside near Barbizon, the village south of Paris where an older generation of landscape painters had made their name. This is one of the results: a tiny oil sketch on a wooden board small enough to hold in one hand. Seurat called these panels croquetons, and he made scores of them, quick studies of fields, trees and figures done in the open air. The single heavy figure planted against the land is what gives this one its title. The date is worth holding onto. This was two years before Bathers at Asnières, the large canvas that first won him notice, and before he worked out the technique of small separate dots of colour that his name is now tied to. Here he is still learning in the older landscape tradition he would soon leave. The panel is in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.