《大碗岛》油画习作

In the spring of 1884 the official Salon turned Seurat down, and he joined a group of other rejected painters in setting up a society that exhibited with no jury at all. That same year he began going out to the Grande Jatte, a long island in the Seine below Paris where clerks and shop girls spent their Sundays within sight of the factory chimneys of Clichy. He worked there on small wooden panels he could carry in a box, this one about 15 by 24 centimetres, blocking the figures in as flat patches of colour with none of the dots that would later cover the big canvas. When he died in 1891 at 31, the panel was listed as number 87 in the inventory of his studio, and it passed to his friend the painter Maximilien Luce.