The Riverbanks

This small panel is Seurat working things out. Around 1882 he was in his early twenties, going out to Asnières, a suburb northwest of Paris where the Seine ran past the factories, and painting quick studies like this one on little wooden boards. Across the water you can pick out the bridge at Courbevoie and, behind it, the smoking chimneys of the works at Clichy. Off to the right lies the tip of a wooded island, La Grande Jatte. He was gathering the ground for his first big canvas, Bathers at Asnières, finished in 1884, and he kept coming back to this exact stretch of river. The island on the right would soon give him the setting for his most famous painting of all, the Sunday crowd on La Grande Jatte.