The Gravelines Channel, towards the sea

Seurat spent the summer of 1890 in the little port of Gravelines, near Dunkirk on the Channel coast, and painted four calm views of the canal that runs from the town out to the sea. He did not know it was his last summer. He would be dead by the next March, at 31, from an illness that took him in a matter of days in Paris. There is no shadow of that here. He took one stretch of the canalised river and painted it at different hours and from different spots, reducing the boats, water and sky to a quiet, nearly empty arrangement. The whole surface is built from countless tiny dots of unmixed colour, so fine that up close the harbour dissolves into shimmer. A few moored herring boats sit out at the left, holding the stillness in place.