Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"

In 1891 this little wooden panel crossed the Channel. Seurat had died in Paris that March after a few days of illness, and his mother gave it to Lucien Pissarro, the painter son of Camille Pissarro, who had settled in London the year before and had shown with Seurat's circle in their dotted manner. Turn the panel over and you find “Seurat 96” written on the back by Paul Signac, Seurat's closest ally, the number it carried in the inventory of the studio. The front is one of about 50 oil sketches and drawings for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It shows the riverbank and the trees, with a few people sitting or standing in the shade, and the Met notes that these figures changed a great deal before the final canvas. The panel later belonged to Félix Fénéon, the critic who had coined the name Neo-Impressionism for this group of painters. The New York banker Robert Lehman bought it in 1954, and it came to the Met with his collection in 1975.