Landscape at Grandcamp

During the summer of 1885, Seurat travelled to the Normandy coast at Grandcamp, painting a series of coastal marines that became landmarks in his development of systematic pointillism. Landscape at Grandcamp is one of these panel studies, small enough to be completed en plein air yet fully displaying his new method of placing pure-colour dots to produce optical mixing in the viewer's eye. These Grandcamp works immediately preceded the completion of La Grande Jatte and showed critics that divisionism could work in both figure subjects and landscape. Now at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille.

The panel surface carries small, even touches of colour divided by hue — blues and greens for the sea, oranges and pinks for the land. The even distribution of marks creates a vibrating surface luminosity characteristic of Seurat's Grandcamp series. Edges remain soft and atmospheric.