Seated Figures, Study for La Grande Jatte

Seurat spent two summers going out to the Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine just downstream from Paris where clerks and shopkeepers took their Sunday afternoons. He worked on small panels that fitted into a paintbox, and this is one of about 30 oil studies he made before starting the large canvas. The wood is left bare in places instead of being primed white, so the grain itself does the work of the shadows. The figures here are not quite the ones he ended up using, though the trees, the riverbank and a white umbrella all turn up in the middle ground of the finished picture, which went on show in 1886 at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition. The panel stayed in private hands until the New York banker Maurice Wertheim bought it in 1944 and left it to Harvard seven years later.