The Forest at Pontaubert

Seurat painted this wood in 1881, when he was 21 and still unknown, a few years before the huge dotted canvases that made his name. He spent two months at Pontaubert, a village south of Paris where Corot and other older French landscape painters had worked before him, and finished the picture that winter in the studio he shared with his friend, the painter Aman-Jean. It is dark and traditional, greens and browns built from short dragged strokes, the same restless touch that would soon harden into his method of separate dots of pure colour. Nothing here yet announces the inventor of pointillism. By 1886 he would unveil the sunlit crowd on the Grande Jatte, stippled from top to bottom in tiny dots.