Seurat spent what would prove to be his last summer seaside painting campaign in 1890 at Gravelines, a small port in northern France midway between Calais and Dunkirk. Described in the 1894 edition of Baedeker's Handbook for Travellers as 'an uninteresting town', this un-picturesque, workaday settlement was not an obvious choice for a painter of seascapes. Indeed, Seurat chose not to paint Gravelines itself but focused on the outlying suburbs of Grand and Petit Fort-Philippe that flank the entry to the canalised river.

However, not only was this unequivocally man-made environment attractive to an artist who regularly explored contrasts between nature and artifice in his urban subjects, but it also offered him a neutral ground on which to experiment with the evocation of the soft and nuanced light of the Channel coast. The Channel at Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe, is the first of four large finished canvases resulting from the trip, all of which were shown at the 1891 exhibition of Les XX in Brussels.

Each depicts a different time of day; here, the blond light and the pale sky convey an early morning. With the tide out and the channel nearly empty, the scene is perhaps more accurately regarded as a landscape than a marine painting. Despite its sparseness and simplicity, the composition is tautly structured, with the buildings, boats, and bollards punctuating the strong horizontal axis at rhythmic intervals.

The brushwork at first appears uniform, but upon closer examination, subtle variations emerge: for example, the tiny points of color are slightly elongated in certain areas, notably the beach, infusing an otherwise static scene devoid of human presence with a sense of movement. Likewise, areas that appear monochrome, such as the sky and the sand, reveal a rich complexity of tone.

It was the first of Seurat's landscapes to be given a dark painted border; the stark contrast with the overall pallor of the painting heightens its luminosity.

Inventory number:

NG6554 

Provenance: