White Houses, Ville D'Avray by Georges Seurat

The flat geometry of the Landscape in the Ile de France reappears here about a year later. The site might be the same as that in Landscape in the Ile de France (the building to the right is nearly identical). By moving to the right of the vantage point of the first picture, Seurat could have had this view, if we are willing to grant that here he includes buildings that he had omitted from the earlier picture.

Because their ground lines are not visible, the buildings seem flattened out, an effect abetted by the long straight wall. The same blocky flatness can be found in rural and village buildings that Camille Pissarro painted a decade earlier near Pontoise, although his compositions are usually less stark because he employed more incident in his foreground. Among broadsides, Seurat collected several that represented buildings in a "primitive" manner, likely proof that he deliberately cultivated those qualities associated with the popular, the unsophisticated, the genuine - qualities that Pissarro favored. Seurat's color, however, is anything but "primitive."

The paint is thicker and has more heightened contrasts than that of the Landscape in the Ile de France. In the shrubbery to the right the colors range from blues through several tints of green to orange, plus some lavender and sparse red. The light blues here and in the middle distance are more saturated than in the earlier canvases, and so are the oranges that contribute importantly to the foreground.