Paisaje en Grandcamp

In the summer of 1885 Seurat left Paris for Grandcamp, a small fishing village on the Normandy coast, and painted the sea in the open air on little wooden panels he could carry. This is one of them, barely bigger than a postcard. He was 25 and in the middle of a much larger project, the huge Sunday scene set on the island of the Grande Jatte, which he kept reworking dot by dot in his new method of placing separate touches of pure colour side by side. On the coast he tested the same idea against water and sky. The paint is laid in small, deliberate flecks that the eye is meant to blend on its own.