The Rue St. Vincent, Paris, in Spring

In 1884 the top of Montmartre was still more village than city. The basilica of Sacré-Cœur had been going up on the summit since 1875, and the Rue Saint-Vincent runs just behind it. Seurat painted this spring view on something very ordinary, the lid of a cedar cigar box, barely 25 centimetres tall. He made many small outdoor sketches like this on wooden panels, and called them croquetons, in the same years he was starting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. This one was still in his studio when he died in 1891. His friends, the critic Félix Fénéon and the painters Maximilien Luce and Paul Signac, then drew up an inventory of the studio, and the little panel went into it as number 71. Fénéon later owned it himself. In 1926 Captain Stanley Sykes bought it from the London dealers Lefèvre, and he gave it to the Fitzwilliam in 1948.