Grassy Riverbank

The first owner of this mysterious small landscape by Georges Seurat was the famed critic, theorist, and dealer Félix Fénéon, who must have admired its equipoise between the landscape aesthetics of the impressionists, with their love of atmosphere, and the more rigorous pictorial construction of the post-impressionists, of whom Cézanne was the most accomplished. Most scholars have dated the painting to 1881-1882, that is, early in the progressive and developmental career of Seurat. Before conceiving of the large-scale canvases that secured his permanent place in the canon of French painting, Seurat made this painting as an independent study of light, reflection, and vegetation in the Parisian suburbs. Daniel Catton Rich, who included this canvas in his landmark Seurat exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, considered it to be the first landscape study painting by Seurat on the island of the Grande Jatte (Rich 1935, 60), where he worked obsessively in the summers of 1884 and 1885. However, no real evidence supports this theory, and the picture is generic enough in its subject that it could have been painted in many parts of the western suburbs of Paris frequented by Seurat.

Unlike the vast majority of landscape studies by the artist, the Reves example was painted on canvas, which Seurat prepared with a white ground and worked with relatively large brushes to give structure to the composition. After attaining a certain order in the composition and achieving the effects of light and color he sought, Seurat worked "into" the surface with smaller brushes, in the manner of Corot, giving life to the foliage with dancing strokes. There is no evidence in this canvas of his interest in the scientific theories of color that were to dominate his art several years later. Instead, every chromatic element in the picture can easily be found in impressionist painting. But when we compare it to earlier landscapes by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, or Pissarro, the eerie loneliness and social isolation of Seurat's aesthetic come into sharp relief. In Seurat's pictorial universe of 1881-1882, there are no strollers, no boaters, no delightful children running along the river. Instead, the viewer is encouraged by the composition of the painting to "become" the painter, hidden in a quiet field of long grass, far from the prying eyes of Parisians, working methodically to set down his sensations on a small canvas. It is almost as if we made these brushstrokes ourselves and could alter them with the slightest effort. Yet, for all the immediacy of its touch and directness of its methods, the painting remains mysterious, and even after lengthy analysis, we know a good deal more about the art of painting and very little about the painter. This air of mystery has always been an essential element of Seurat's aesthetic.

"Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection," page 79