Sunset

This is a pocket-sized thing, painted on a wooden panel about the size of a cigar-box lid, which is most likely exactly what it was. Seurat was 21 or so, lately back from a year of military service at Brest, and through the early 1880s he carried these little boards outdoors and worked up studies on them that he called croquetons. He made this one near Fontainebleau, the forest and farmland south-east of Paris where Corot, Millet and the Barbizon painters had been going out to paint from nature for decades. A ploughed field runs back towards an orchard and farm buildings, with the sun dropping behind them. It is one of the earliest oil paintings by him that survives.