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.