Everframe Gallery
Final Study for Bathers at Asnières by Georges Seurat
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Final Study for Bathers at Asnières, 1884

Georges Seurat

Oil on canvas · 201 x 301.5 cm

Factory workers cool off by the Seine in Seurat's early dotted technique.

Working men and boys laze by the Seine in the industrial suburbs, bathed in flat, hazy sunlight. Seurat's calm, monumental early masterpiece gives ordinary Parisian leisure the stillness of a fresco — quiet, warm and beautifully composed.

What you're looking at

This is the working study rather than the finished picture — painted small, quickly and outdoors, before the two-metre canvas it was made for. The setting is not countryside: those are the factory chimneys of Clichy across the water, and the men are workers on a Sunday. Seurat gives them the stillness and scale usually reserved for a fresco, which is the whole argument of the painting.

On a Frame TV

About 1.6:1. The clean crop takes a modest trim from the ends and holds the figures on the bank. Warm, hazy and low in contrast — comfortable in daylight.

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