Летний пейзаж

In 1883 Seurat was 23 and had shown almost nothing in public. He was working outdoors that year on small wood panels he could hold in one hand, painting fast and carrying the results back to the studio. He called them croquetons, little sketches, and he made around seventy of them early on. This is one, barely 16 centimetres across. They were working material. Through 1883 he was stocking up light, colour and posture for his first large canvas, the Bathers at Asnières, which he finished the next year and which the Salon jury turned down. The panel belonged to the American collector Paul Mellon by 1966, and reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington through his bequest in 1999.