Paysan à la houe II

Seurat was 22 in 1882, a couple of years out of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and spending his time on small studies of farm labour. The model behind them was Jean-Francois Millet, dead since 1875, whose sowers and gleaners had turned peasant work into a serious subject and a political argument in France. Seurat kept the subject and changed the handling, laying the paint in crossed strokes that catch two colours at once. That habit grew into the divided colour of La Grande Jatte later in the decade. The picture is about 46 centimetres high, a bent figure and a hoe and not much else. It sits in the founding collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which Guggenheim assembled in the 1930s around the non-objective painting of Kandinsky and his circle.