Final Study for "Bathers at Asnières"
Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891)
1883
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 15.8 × 25.1 cm (6 1/4 × 9 7/8 in.); Framed: 54.3 × 63.9 × 6.1 cm (21 3/8 × 25 1/8 × 2 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc.
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Georges Seurat made this painting as a preparatory work for his monumental Bathers at Asnières, now in the National Gallery, London. It shows men and boys on the bank of the Seine River in the working-class Parisian suburb of Asnières. The view presented here is just across the river from the leisure park Seurat immortalized in his best-known work, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884. The frozen gestures and sedate poses of these bathers set a mood distinct from the sparkling scenes of Parisians enjoying restaurants and other riverbank activities favored by the Impressionists. Nevertheless, Seurat’s focus on a subject from modern life, his luminous palette, and his airy brushwork show how the young artist adapted characteristics of Impressionist painting for his own purposes.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
