郊外

Georges Seurat painted this bleak stretch of city edge around 1881, a few years before he invented the dotted technique that made his name. There is no science of colour here yet, just thick, hazy paint smeared warm with orange and pink over a poor suburb of bare houses and a chimney smoking on the left. These were the outskirts where Paris was spreading into factory and shantytown, and Seurat kept going back to such unlovely fringes. This was the ground he worked his ideas out on, in the same years that led toward his large Bathers at Asnières of 1884. He was only 22 here, and he had barely ten years of painting left.