Study for Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp

In the early 1880s Claude Monet had painted the Normandy cliffs again and again from dizzying spots close to the edge. When Seurat spent the summer of 1885 at Grandcamp, a fishing port further west along the same coast, he took a similar high viewpoint over a crag outside the town called the Bec du Hoc. The National Gallery of Australia, which owns this panel, thinks Monet's cliffs may have given him the idea.

He painted it on the spot, on a wooden board smaller than a sheet of writing paper. Back in Paris it became the basis for a much larger canvas, now at Tate in London. Here you can still see the rocky shore at the foot of the cliff, which the finished picture leaves out, so that there the headland rises straight against open water. The gallery in Canberra bought this panel in 1984 with the proceeds of an exhibition called The Great Impressionists.