Vaso de flores

Almost nothing survives from Seurat's beginnings. He seems to have destroyed most of his early canvases, and this is the only still life by him we have. He painted it around 1878, a student of about 19 who had just entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and its reds owe something to the late flower pictures of Delacroix, whose use of colour Seurat was studying closely. He was already reading the science of how colours affect one another, and you can see the beginning of an idea in the background, built up from small repeated vertical strokes rather than smooth blending. That habit of laying colour down in separate touches would grow, a few years on, into the dotted technique now called pointillism and the huge Sunday scene on the Grande Jatte. For now it is just a vase of flowers, kept by his family for decades before it reached Harvard.