Preparatory Sketch for the Painting La Grève du Bas-Butin, Honfleur

In May 1886 Seurat unveiled his huge dotted canvas of Parisians by the Seine, the Grande Jatte, at what turned out to be the last Impressionist exhibition. That summer he left the city for Honfleur on the Normandy coast and spent it painting the harbour and the shore, testing his methodical touch against open water and changing sea light. This small panel is a first lay-in for one of those pictures, the beach called the Bas-Butin below the cliffs. It is quick and broad, oil brushed onto wood, the sort of study Seurat called a croqueton, made outdoors and then worked up in the studio into the finished, evenly stippled canvas that now hangs in Tournai in Belgium. He was 26 that summer and had five years left to live.