Evening, Honfleur

Georges-Pierre Seurat, 1886 · Gallery 501 · Floor 5

Alright, so, there are at least twenty-five colors in this thing. But… it looks like a handful. Gray. Green. A little pink. Go ahead. Try to find… twenty. Now get up close. It’s just dots. Thousands of them, sitting side by side. That’s where the rest are hiding. Those gray clouds, up close, are blue dots and orange dots. Your eye made the gray. The green water’s got yellow in it. Even the pink beach is full of blue. Okay, now back up a bit… There it is. One little box of evening. So, Seurat came to Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy. Said he wanted to “wash the light of the studio” out of his eyes. He’d been reading about optics. How our eyes see color. So he puts the colors next to each other in little dots. Lets the person looking do the mixing. He paints the dots. You put the picture together. And from here, it shimmers. So… Seurat’s only twenty-six when he paints this. The dot thing gets a name. Pointillism. Which makes sense… it’s just dots. His friend Signac picks it up. Then a whole crowd of painters after him. Seurat doesn’t get to see where it goes. A few years after this, he’s dead. At only thirty-one. Now the frame. He painted that too. Added it later. Same stuff, but easier to pick out here. Up in the top right, the dots get a little lighter. Like the sunset keeps going. Right out of the box.

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