Banks of the Seine near Courbevoie

Banks of the Seine near Courbevoie, at the Hyde Collection, is one of Seurat's 1883 river landscapes, prefiguring the famous Seine views at Courbevoie he would paint in the mid-1880s using his fully developed pointillist technique. The river site near Courbevoie — a suburb northwest of Paris across the Seine from Neuilly — was accessible by train and popular with Parisian day-trippers. These early Seine studies established Seurat's commitment to the river environment that would ultimately produce some of the nineteenth century's most formally innovative paintings.

Seurat handles the river surface with horizontal strokes that convey the still quality of the Seine in calm weather, the reflections of the far bank described with measured tonal economy. The painting shows him already thinking about the geometry of the composition — the horizontal of the water, the vertical of distant trees — with a structural intentionality that goes beyond conventional plein-air recording.