Bathers at Asnieres
Georges Seurat (1859 to 1891) · 1884
On a hot afternoon a group of young working men rest on the bank of the Seine at Asnieres, a suburb north west of Paris. One sits with his feet in the water, one lies on the grass with his hat beside him, a boy in a red cap stands waist deep and cups his hands to call across the river. Behind them, on the far bank, the factory chimneys of Clichy smoke in the haze, and a sailing boat and a ferry glide past. It is a quiet scene, but painted on the scale of a history painting.
Seurat was only twenty four when he finished it, and it was his first large canvas. He prepared it with more than a dozen oil sketches on small wooden panels and many drawings in soft black crayon. The surface is not yet the pure dots of his later work, but a mixture of criss cross brushstrokes, blocks of colour and, in places he went back to afterwards, small touches of orange and blue laid side by side so that they mix in the eye. Look at the boy's red cap and how its complementary green halo around it makes the colour sing.
The Paris Salon rejected the painting in 1884, and Seurat showed it instead with a new group of independent artists, which set the course of his short career. Its companion piece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, shows the fashionable crowd on the opposite bank of the same stretch of river. The National Gallery bought the picture in 1924. Notice how still every figure is; Seurat gives labourers on a day off the calm dignity of a classical frieze.
Did You Know? The far bank of the river in this picture is the island of La Grande Jatte, the setting of Seurat's even more famous next painting.
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