拿锄头的男人

When Millet showed a labourer leaning on his hoe at the Paris Salon of 1863, reviewers read the picture as a warning, a farm worker who might one day straighten up. Seurat had been born four years before that. Around 1882, in his early 20s, he was walking out to the edges of Paris with small wooden boards, painting field workers on panels you could put in a coat pocket. This one is about 16 by 25 centimetres. The man is bent almost double with the tool raised behind him, and the ground is laid in as horizontal bands of brown and green in short separated strokes, the habit he carried into the Sunday crowd of La Grande Jatte, which he began two years later. The panel came to the National Gallery of Art in 2014 with the Mellon collection.