Two Stonebreakers

Georges Seurat died in Paris in March 1891, only 31, after a sudden illness. On 3 May a small group met in his studio to sort through what he had left: his brother Émile, his companion Madeleine Knobloch, the painters Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, and the critic Félix Fénéon. The small oil sketches on wood that Seurat called croquetons were listed and shared out between family and friends. This is one of them. On the back, Luce wrote "G. Seurat" and, beneath it, an L. Seurat had painted it some ten years earlier, around 1881, when he was just starting out. Two labourers work in a green field, one bent over on the left, the other standing in a white shirt behind a long pale strip of broken stone. From the studio it went to Seurat's cousin Paul Levasseur, and it came to Yale as a gift in 1969.