Evening, Honfleur by Georges Seurat

In presentation, arrangement, and autographic style, this work is very like a Japanese print. The whole scene is rendered with very few touches. It is a restful painting. Long strips of cloud and water are intersected with the short verticals of the pilings and of the rocks, lighted from behind, at the right.

Seurat has dared to paint a sunset in frontal view - this is the hallmark of a great artist, for it is not for nothing that "daubers" are fond of the motif: it lends itself to every sort of vulgarity.

A study of this painting, now in the Jean Pacquement collection in Paris, shows how carefully Seurat composed his works. The study is a mere casual notation from nature, a rough sketch. Comparing it with the painting, it can be seen how much Seurat added in the way of construction, organization, and the picture's very rhythm. Here the artist succeeded in painting a scene where there is nothing to see - a few pilings, a rock at the edge of the water, the sky, and the sea. But within these broad surfaces, he makes infinite modulations and creates all sorts of tensions of light and color. Now he suggests, now he emphasizes and gives an excellent idea of the coast's remoter stretches. Little by little, the canvas comes alive with transparent clouds and the light dancing on the water. The dots endow with vibration the very subtle coloring with which the artist shows us the moment of nightfall, when the clouds are darkening in the sky's last glow, the light on the sea is growing cold, and shadows steal over the land.