Paysage au piquet

In 1882 Georges Seurat was in his early twenties and still painting much the way other young landscapists of his day worked, out in the countryside north of Paris with a loaded brush. This small canvas, under half a metre wide, belongs to that moment, a few years before he began breaking color into the tiny separate dots that would make his name. The paint here is laid in short dragged strokes rather than points, catching dry grass and the flat light of open country. A single wooden stake driven into the ground gives the picture its title and holds the eye, a plain marker in an otherwise empty stretch of field. These were the years Seurat spent studying how light behaves on open ground and reading the new color theory then circulating in Paris, testing it on modest rural scenes like this one long before he ever attempted a crowd.