Le Crotoy Downstream by Georges Seurat

Seurat painted only two pictures at Le Crotoy in the summer of 1889; he was recalled to Paris, one assumes, by news of Madeleine Knoblock's pregnancy. Le Crocoy is another of those unassuming seaside villages chat Seurat preferred-fishing pores chat housed vacationers without providing the chic institutions of the more frequented resorts such as Trouville.

About thirty miles northeast of Dieppe, just as the French coastline turns due north, Le Crotoy occupies a stumpy peninsula that projects southward from the northern side of the estuarial bay of the Somme River. In this painting we are just beyond the village on the northwest side, looking south across the bay. Minuscule people speckle the beach in front of two crawlers headed out to the Channel below huge rolling clouds that cake on oddly monstrous forms.

The cluster of buildings on the left reveals brick walls in yellows, cans, oranges, and reds and slate roofs in blues marked with reddish oranges. To their right, the nearby sand is virtually created by the underlayer of crisscross strokes that remain prominent despite a surface coating of small spots. The richest colors are reserved for the darker portions of the verdure, which contains several greens, including olive, plus several tints of orange, orange blue, and red.

The painted border was conceived integrally with the picture (borders for the previous summer marines were after-thoughts); it shifts colors with every change in the continuous composition. The painting was exhibited in 1889 with a wide painted frame that subsequently disappeared.