Paysage rose

This is a tiny thing, a landscape barely bigger than a postcard, painted on a small wooden panel around 1886. That was the year Seurat unveiled his huge Sunday on the Grande Jatte in Paris, and critics coined a name for his method of building an image from separate dots of color. Beside that vast, painstaking canvas, panels like this one were quick outdoor studies, laid down in loose flecks of rose and green to catch a patch of light. It was later cut away from a larger board that had carried a second small landscape beside it.