The Seine seen from La Grande Jatte

In 1888, two years after he had shown his great Sunday crowd on the island of La Grande Jatte, Seurat went back to the island and set up facing the river. This panel, about 16 by 25 centimetres, was very likely painted on the spot. The far bank runs across as a flat band, and a tree trunk and a sailboat stand up against it. He primed the wood with a thick white ground, so the loose dots of colour sit on something bright and glow. On the left Seurat first placed a large white-sailed yacht, then painted it out, and a ghost of it still shows through. The study fed a bigger canvas of the same view that he finished that year, now in Brussels.