働く農夫

The support is a piece of wood roughly the size of a cigar-box lid, which is what these panels often were. From about 1882 Seurat carried them out into the fields around Paris and painted farm workers on them, dozens of small oil studies of men stooping, digging and cutting.

He was 23, had walked away from the École des Beaux-Arts, and was reading colour theory rather than copying old masters, in particular the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul on how two colours set side by side alter each other. A panel like this one cost him nothing to risk, so he hatched one tone across another and watched what it did.

Those labourers fed into his first large canvas, Bathers at Asnières. The Salon jury refused it in 1884, and he hung it that spring with the group of independent artists he had helped to set up instead.