The Mower

Seurat is remembered for a technique he had not yet invented when he made this. In the early 1880s he was in his early twenties, still a few years short of the tiny separated dots of colour that would fill A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Here he works small, on a wood panel not much bigger than a book, painting a farm labourer swinging his scythe in the last of the evening light. The mood comes straight from Jean-François Millet, the older French painter whose grave, plain pictures of peasants Seurat admired. For these few years the fields and the people who worked them were almost his only subject. Soon he turned to city crowds and the dots, and never really painted a mower again.