Georges Seurat (1859–1891)
1889
Oil paint on canvas
Le Crotoy, summer 1889
For his 1889 summer campaign, Georges Seurat moved further up the coast to the town of Le Crotoy, located on the estuary of the river Somme. Instead of cliffs, the region offered low sand dunes and the two paintings he made that summer mark a major shift in his coastal scenes. The tight and deliberately congested compositions of Honfleur and Port-en-Bessin have been replaced by expansive vistas. Here, the breadth of the beach is indicated by a few vertical lines representing tiny figures on the sand. This work also shows an increasingly refined approach to the application of paint and a tightening of his dots of colour.