A praia «Le Bas Butin», Honfleur

In the spring of 1886 Seurat had just shown his huge Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Paris, where its thousands of tiny dots of color set critics arguing. Instead of staying for the noise, he spent that summer on the Normandy coast at Honfleur, quietly turning the same painstaking method onto the sea. This is the beach below the cliff called Le Bas Butin. There is almost nothing in it, a slope of pale sand, a flat gray Channel, a few small boats near the horizon, and every inch is built from separate touches of unmixed color meant to blend in your eye rather than on the palette. He painted it at 26. Five years later he was dead of a sudden illness that took him in a matter of days.