One of the great treasures in the trove that is London’s National Gallery is this masterpiece of Neo-Impressionism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actually one of a pair of Seurat masterpieces, alongside A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (held at the Art Institute of Chicago), with each sister painting depicting one side of the Seine river and portraying the different levels of French society that frequented them in their leisure time: the wealthy society relaxing at La Grande Jatte and the working-class residents hanging out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paintings are leading examples of the technique developed by Seurat and known as pointillism, involving the use of thousands of small, distinct dots of colour and relying on the ability of the eye and the mind of the viewer to blend the individual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actually first used in a pejorative sense to mock Seurat (a reaction commonly experienced by art pioneers of course) but it stuck, and the technique is representative of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for interesting new methods.

Here, we’re focusing on the working-class residents of the city. They line this picturesque spot by the river as they enjoy the sunshine. There are around five figures in the foreground and down the bank we see other people and boats in the background, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the buildings are low level and don’t take too much attention from the figures nearest us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jatte where the bourgeoisie enjoy the shade) and the characters are flooded with sunlight.

Seurat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paintings are monumentally sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seurat knew that size would need to be met with technical brilliance and so he prepared very carefully with thirteen oil sketches and ten drawings before embarking on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stunning luminosity and plenty of interest to hold the viewer’s attention. Sadly, Seurat died at just 31 and so we will never know what sort of direction his style might have taken in the next decades.