The Channel at Gravelines, Petit-Fort-Philippe

Seurat arrived in Gravelines in late June 1890, a fishing town at the mouth of the Aa river between Calais and the Belgian border. The Baedeker guide of those years dismissed it in a line, an uninteresting place with 5,952 inhabitants. Every summer since 1885 he had gone alone to some quiet stretch of the Channel coast to work. He painted this small panel outdoors, standing at the edge of Grand-Fort-Philippe and looking across the narrow channel at the white lighthouse on the far bank, and grains of beach sand are still caught in the paint. The two-masted boat by the promenade never made it into the large canvas he built from this over the following winter. Around the edge of the panel runs a thin border of blue dots, the start of a painted frame meant to carry on in ultramarine onto flat wood. None of the frames he made for the Gravelines pictures survive.