Fort Samson, Grandcamp

Seurat spent the summer of 1885 at Grandcamp, a small port on the Normandy coast, and it was his first season working in front of the sea. Fort Samson stood about 15 minutes' walk from the town, a low battery on the cliff edge. He was 25, and back in Paris a very large canvas was waiting, the Sunday crowd on the island of La Grande Jatte, which he had already shown to friends and was not done with. Through the following winter he went back into it and reworked the surface with the small separated touches he had been trying out all summer on pictures like this one. La Grande Jatte went on the wall in May 1886, at the eighth and last of the Impressionist exhibitions.