The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe

In the summer of 1890, Seurat painted a series of canvases along the Channel coast at Gravelines, a small fort town near Dunkirk. The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe is one of four major paintings from this campaign, which proved to be his last summer of coastal work before his sudden death the following spring. The extreme horizontal stillness of the Gravelines paintings, with their near-empty compositions of water, sky, and distant buoys, represents the furthest point of his reduction of landscape to pure chromatic sensation. The work is at a Scottish institution.

The composition is almost entirely horizontal, with sky and water divided by a thin land strip. The surface is uniformly dotted with blues, greens, and orange-pink complementaries. The extraordinary emptiness of the scene maximises the viewer's experience of the pointillist surface as optical field rather than depicted space.