Port-en-Bessin, l'avant-port, marée basse

In the summer of 1888 Seurat left Paris for Port-en-Bessin, a small fishing harbour on the Normandy coast, and painted the sea at low tide. He did not work the way the Impressionists did, dashing down what he saw in a rush. He built the picture out of thousands of tiny separate dots of colour, a method people called pointillism, so that the eye mixes the hues at a distance rather than on the canvas. Everything is measured and still, the masts and flagpoles set like uprights against the flat water, as if he wanted this one ordinary afternoon to feel permanent. Seurat even carried the dots out into a painted border around the scene. He was only 28 that summer, and had barely three years left to live when he died suddenly in 1891.