Contadina seduta nell'erba

This is Seurat before the dots. He painted this peasant woman around 1883, in his early twenties, still working in a dark, earthy manner learned from Jean-Francois Millet, the painter of French farm labour a generation before him. The colours are muted browns and greens, laid on in short crisscrossing strokes rather than the precise points he would soon become known for. He was already reading the colour theories that would lead him there, but the pointillism of his great Sunday scene on the island of the Grande Jatte was still two years off. What you see instead is a solid, anonymous figure sunk into the grass, her face left indistinct, closer to a study of weight and posture than a portrait. Seurat kept the canvas small, roughly the size of a sheet of paper.