Evening, Honfleur

Evening, Honfleur (1886) was painted during Seurat's summer at the Normandy coastal town, the same campaign that produced Bas Butin and Corner of the Harbour. The evening light condition — the transition from warm afternoon to cooler dusk — presented Seurat with one of his favourite chromatic challenges: the systematic rendering of how complementary temperature shifts manifest themselves in divided colour. Museum of Modern Art, New York holds this meditation on dusk over the water.

The painting's dominant tonality shifts from warm yellow-orange near the sun to cooler blue and lavender in the upper sky. Water reflects these gradients in a lower-key register. The dot-work surface is carefully regulated so that the optical mixture produces a convincing atmospheric recession from warm foreground to cool distance.