The Morning Walk

The Morning Walk (1884) is a small wooden panel made during the period when Seurat was preparing Bathers at Asnières and beginning his studies for La Grande Jatte. The solitary walking figure in morning light offered a focused exercise in divisionist rendering of contre-jour illumination. Such studies of figures in landscape were the building blocks from which Seurat constructed his monumental Sunday afternoon scenes. The National Gallery, London, holds this intimate work alongside the far larger Bathers at Asnières.

The figure is caught in strong morning backlight, its form defined by a vibrating halo of warm dots against a cooler background. The small panel format required Seurat to maintain precise dot consistency at a miniature scale. The ground is built from short, directional strokes while the sky is more uniformly dotted.