Le Jardinier I

When Seurat painted this small panel around 1882 he was barely 23 and years away from the dotted, sunlit crowds that would make his name. Here he is still working close to the earlier painters of the French countryside, especially Jean-François Millet, whose stooped labourers he admired. The gardener bends to his work in a muted range of browns and greens, a figure of rural toil rather than city leisure. But Seurat was already reading colour theory, including the American physicist Ogden Rood, and the small separate touches of brighter pigment here hint at the method he would soon push much further. He returned to this gardener more than once; a slightly later version hangs in New York.