Estudo de figuras para La Grande Jatte

La Grande Jatte is a long, thin island in the Seine just downstream of Paris at Asnières, where factory chimneys and rowing clubs stood side by side and clerks came out on Sundays. Seurat worked there through 1884 on small wooden panels he could carry in a box, some of them no bigger than a cigar-box lid. This one is 15 centimetres by 24. He was fixing figures and their shadows outdoors before assembling them into a composition in the studio. That same spring the Salon jury had turned him down, and he joined the painters who answered by founding a society of their own, the Indépendants, with no jury at all. The big canvas built out of panels like this went on show in 1886, first with the Impressionists in May and then with the Indépendants in August.