The Watering Can - Garden at Le Raincy

In the 1880s Le Raincy, about 15 kilometres east of Paris, was still a new place. The land had been a royal park belonging to the family of King Louis-Philippe. The state took it from them in 1852, villas went up among the old trees, and only in 1869 did the houses become a town of their own. Seurat's father lived there, apart from his wife and children in Paris, and came into the city to see them once a week. Around 1883 the painter took a small wooden panel, not much bigger than a paperback, into a walled garden in Le Raincy and painted a path, the garden wall and a grey watering can left at the edge of the grass. That same year his main effort was a large canvas of young men bathing in the Seine at Asnières. The panel stayed in the family and belonged to his brother-in-law, Léon Appert, before it reached Washington in 1999 as a bequest from the collector Paul Mellon.