Landscape at Saint-Ouen

Dated to 1878 or 1879, this is the earliest known of Seurat’s landscape oil sketches. His good friend, the artist Aman-Jean, remembered him painting it on site at Saint-Ouen, a northern suburb of Paris. Seurat introduced warm, orangey-brown hues into the composition by allowing the wood panel support to show through between his brushstrokes. This work was originally part of a double-sided panel that was divided after 1950 into two separate pictures. The other side, now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, features a landscape with a copy after Puvis de Chavannes’s The Poor Fisherman (1881; Musée d’Orsay).