The Seine at La Grande Jatte

This is the same island that made Seurat famous. Two years earlier he had finished a huge canvas of Sunday crowds on La Grande Jatte, a strip of land in the Seine just outside Paris, packed with strollers in their best clothes. Here he came back to it in the spring of 1888 with none of that spectacle: an empty stretch of river, a rowboat, a single white sail, trees along the bank. The whole surface is built from small separate dots of pure colour, laid so the eye mixes them at a distance, the method Seurat worked out and held to. He was 28 when he painted it. Three years later he was dead, of a sudden illness, leaving only a handful of these large works.