Seascape (Gravelines)

In the summer of 1890 Seurat went to Gravelines, a small port on the Channel coast between Calais and Dunkirk. It turned out to be his last summer of landscapes. He died the following March, aged 31. At Gravelines he painted four large canvases and a handful of small oil sketches on wooden panels, and this is one of them, a view of sand, sea and sky only 25 centimetres wide.

These little panels were the pictures he carried outdoors, and across his career he made around 160 of them. The Courtauld Gallery in London calls them the place where he was at his most free and experimental. Look at the edge. The frame around the scene is painted too, a border of coloured dots that belongs to the picture itself. In his Gravelines paintings Seurat set each stretch of such a border against the colour next to it, so that the two would sharpen each other.

The collector Paul Mellon owned the panel by 1966 and left it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1999, though it only entered the collection in 2012, when his widow gave up her lifetime use of it.