La passeggiata mattutina

The riverbank here is Courbevoie, a suburb just downstream from Paris where the Seine ran past factories and boatyards and, on a fine morning, ordinary people came out to walk. Seurat painted this small panel around 1884 and 1885, in the same stretch of years he was building his huge Sunday scene of the nearby island of La Grande Jatte. It reads as a study rather than a statement, worked on a piece of wood he could hold in one hand, the composition stacked in flat bands of near bank, water, far shore and rooftops. He was just then working out the method of separate touches of pure colour that would make his name, yet on the water you can still see the looser, wetter strokes he had taken from the Impressionists. A single woman walks the towpath, dark against the shine of the river.