View of the Seine

Before Seurat painted anything large he made about 70 small oil studies on wood panels, boards he could hold in one hand and carry out to the river. He called them croquetons, little sketches. This is among the earliest of the ones he made along the Seine on the outskirts of Paris, where the riverbank was turning industrial in the early 1880s, barges moving cargo, chimneys behind the trees, and two men fishing in the foreground in the middle of it. The same stretch of water gave him Bathers at Asnieres, which he finished in 1884 and showed with the new Independents after the Salon turned it down. The panel itself is about the size of a sheet of writing paper, roughly 16 by 25 centimetres.