The Channel at Gravelines, Petit-Fort-Philippe (Le chenal de Gravelines, Petit-Fort-Philippe)

Georges-Pierre Seurat is best known for his large-scale scenes of modern life, but he was also an accomplished landscape painter with a particular talent for marines. This work was painted in the last summer of Seurat’s short life at the seaport of Gravelines on the Channel coast of France near the Belgian border. Seurat’s signature pointillist handling is evident, for example, in the mast where color is broken up into patches of blue, yellow and vermilion red. The absence of any human presence lends an ethereal, ghostly atmosphere to the composition.