Two Sailboats at Grandcamp

In the summer of 1885 Seurat left Paris for Grandcamp, a small resort on the Normandy coast, with an unfinished picture waiting at home. His huge canvas of a Sunday on the Grande Jatte was still in the studio. Here on the shore he worked small, on wooden panels he could hold in one hand, painting the sea and the boats directly in front of him. He called these little studies croquetons. Two sailboats sit on a bright, calm sea, laid down in short separated touches of colour. When he came back to Paris that winter he reworked the big painting with what the coast had taught him. This panel is barely the size of a book.