The beach "Le Bas Butin", Honfleur

Seurat painted the beach at Le Bas Butin near Honfleur in the summer of 1886, the same year he showed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition. These coastal paintings of the mid-1880s mark the consolidation of his pointillist method on location: small, precise dots of pure colour applied to evoke the shimmer of sea air and afternoon light. Honfleur, historically associated with Boudin and the birth of plein-air painting, now became a laboratory for systematic chromatism. Held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tournai.

The surface is covered in uniform short strokes placed with deliberate regularity, separating warm sand tones from cool maritime blues. A horizontal low horizon maximises sky and sea, while the foreground beach is built from interlocking dots of ochre, cream, and pink light.