The pile of stones

In the early 1880s, before he turned 30 and before anyone knew his name, Seurat spent his days in the working suburbs northeast of Paris, near Le Raincy, where his family kept a house. He painted small studies of the people who did the hard jobs out there, among them the men who broke stone by the roadside into gravel for the new streets going up around the city. Within two years he would show A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and startle Paris by building his pictures out of thousands of separate dots. Something of that method is already stirring in this little scene. The laborer has nearly dropped from view, and what holds the eye is the heap of stone itself, caught in full sunlight, crushed from solid blocks into loose bright fragments.