Пейзаж Иль-де-Франса

This is Seurat before Seurat. Around 1881 he was barely into his twenties and painting small landscapes out in the countryside near Paris, still working in loose, ordinary brushstrokes not far from the Impressionists he admired. There are no dots here yet. Within a few years he would break the surface of his canvases into thousands of tiny, deliberate points of pure color, arranged by what he took to be the laws of optics, and finish the huge Sunday on the Grande Jatte that made him famous. This quiet field of cottages and grass comes from just before that turn, when he was still testing how light behaves out of doors. He would be dead of illness at 31, only about a decade after painting it.