Study for 'La Grande Jatte'

Most of Seurat's studies for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte show the island in the afternoon, like the huge finished canvas now in Chicago. This one is a morning. He painted it in 1884 or 1885, very likely on the spot, on a small board of unprimed wood that still shows through in the water. The sun comes from the south-east, so light and shadow fall the opposite way to the other studies. The foreground is in full sun, the middle ground in shade under thick foliage, and the grass fills almost three-quarters of the panel. Seurat broke up its greens with strokes of orange, pink, wine red and pale blue, and along the edges of the sunlit patches he laid purple tints against the green. The collector Heinz Berggruen gave the panel to the National Gallery in 1995.