The Stone Breaker III

In 1882 Georges Seurat was in his early 20s and not yet the painter of tiny dots who would later make his name. He spent this stretch on small oil panels he could hold in one hand, painted outdoors in the flat suburbs northeast of Paris, around Le Raincy. His subjects were the people working those roads and fields. Reapers, gardeners, and here a stonebreaker, the laborer who knelt at the roadside smashing rock into gravel. A generation earlier Jean-François Millet had turned figures like this into a statement about the hardness of peasant life. Seurat kept the worker and dropped the sermon. He was after something more technical: how a lit body sits against sunlit ground, and how one colour presses against another. On a board small enough to hold in one hand, the stonebreaker is barely a thumb high, bent to his rock at the edge of the road.