page_title: Bathers at Asnières
section_title: Preparatory works and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Bathers at Asnières / Preparatory works and influences
caption_attribution_description: English: Final Study for "Bathers at Asnières", 1883
context_page_description: Bathers at Asnières is an 1884 oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Georges Pierre Seurat, the first of his two masterpieces on the monumental scale. The canvas is of a suburban, placid Parisian riverside scene. Isolated figures, with their clothes piled sculpturally on the riverbank, together with trees, austere boundary walls and buildings, and the River Seine are presented in a formal layout. A combination of complex brushstroke techniques, and a meticulous application of contemporary colour theory bring to the composition a sense of gentle vibrancy and timelessness.
  Seurat completed the painting of Bathers at Asnières in 1884, when he was twenty-four years old. He applied to the jury of the Salon of the same year to have the work exhibited there, but the jury rejected it. The Bathers continued to puzzle many of Seurat’s contemporaries, and the picture was not widely acclaimed until many years after the death of the artist at the age of just thirty-one. An appreciation of the painting’s merits grew during the twentieth century, and today it hangs in the National Gallery, London, where it is considered one of the highlights of the gallery’s collection of paintings.
context_section_description: In 1878 and 1879—only a few years prior to painting the Bathers—Seurat had been a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. The École instructed its students that before work began on any large scale painting, there must first be extensive efforts with preparatory paintings and drawings. It seems possible that Seurat completed his first small oil study in this preparatory phase for the painting of the Bathers as early as 1882. 
  César de Hauke’s catalogue raisonné of the works of Seurat lists fourteen works as oil studies for the Bathers, most if not all of which were almost certainly painted outdoors, and in which the composition of the final piece may be seen gradually taking shape. The last of these studies—presently housed at the Art Institute of Chicago—was painted in 1883 and is very close to the final work, except most obviously in respect of its size; it is just 25 cm long and 16 cm high. Seurat was fond of these small studies, calling them his croquetons (a nonce word best translated as ‘sketchettes’), and hanging them on the walls of his studio.
  Whereas for the most part Seurat used these oil studies to work through his compositional problems, nine extant drawings in conté crayon show him focusing individually on each of the five main figures in the painting. The drawings show Seurat working out ways of deploying light and shade for the purpose of implying space and plasticity. Many of the details the painter worked on in these monochrome drawings were to find their final realisation when translated into the colours of the finished oil painting.
  These arduous methods of preparation were in keeping with the general values espoused at the École. But one professor from that institution was to have a more particular and wide ranging impact on Seurat’s imagination, which bore directly discernable effects in the Bathers. Charles Blanc had been a professor and director at the École and had arranged for copies of Quattrocento fresco paintings from Arezzo to be displayed in the École chapel. The huge, stately and dignified figures in these frescos, and the regularity of their spacing has obvious echoes in the Bathers. Among these fresco painters was Piero della Francesca, whose Resurrection depicts a sleeping guard at the bottom-left sharing a number of features with the seated man in Bathers at Asnières. The curvature of slumping back and bent legs is clearly matched in both figures, and indeed the posture also appears in the Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea of Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, a painting with which any student at the École would have been familiar. The sculpted contours of Piero’s soldier’s cape find an echo in the rugged contours of the trousers in Seurat’s painting, and the flick at the back of the guard’s hat becomes a rhythmic motif showing up with hats, hair and bootstraps alike in Bathers.
  Further, Blanc had written a book in 1867, which Seurat read the year he began his studies at the École, and which was to strongly influence him during his formative years—the Grammaire des arts du dessin. Near the beginning of this book, Blanc had claimed that Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses was an exemplary case of how art should idealise nature, concluding his passage, ‘This is how a scene from everyday life suddenly becomes raised to the dignity of a history painting.’ This remark seems pertinent to the Bathers, which certainly shares a number of compositional elements with Poussin’s masterpiece of 1638. Both works show to the right a lowered male figure, and to the left a reclining male figure painted from behind. The horizon in both paintings is punctured just off-centre with a head, and in both paintings the river is spanned with a distant bridge, with block-like buildings on the left bank and trees on the other. And both pictures have a flat-bottomed boat at the centre-right.
  The influence of Seurat’s French contemporary Pierre Puvis de Chavannes—and in particular of his Doux Pays shown at the Salon of 1882—is also evident in the Bathers. Both paintings are on the monumental scale—that of Puvis’ being ove
caption: Final study, 1883, now in the Art Institute of Chicago
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