Bathers at Asnières

Bathers at Asnières, French artist Georges Seurat’s first large-scale painting (measuring 6.59 × 9.84 feet [2.01 × 3.00 meters]). It depicts factory workers relaxing in the sunshine by the Seine River. Images of “lowly” workingmen were more typical of small-scale genre paintings, but here they are given a subversive monumental grandeur.

Completed in 1884, Bathers was rejected by the jury of the annual Salon that year. Seurat consequently participated in the founding of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, an association that was intended to hold annual exhibitions “with neither jury nor prizes” that would accept the work of any artist who wanted to participate. Bathers was shown at the first Salon des Indépendants that same year.

Seurat was the founder of Neo-Impressionism, an artistic movement that both evolved from Impressionism and reacted against it. The term was coined by the art critic Félix Fénéon, who ultimately purchased Bathers. Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist artists were alike in their interest in light and color and in depicting modern life. Yet, unlike painters such as Claude Monet who sought to capture a fleeting moment, Seurat worked painstakingly to present a moment transformed into timelessness. The formal geometry and stillness of Bathers recalls the paintings of the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, especially his Flagellation of Christ (late 1450s).

Seurat was fascinated by contemporary color theories and developed the technique called pointillism, in which small dots of pure color are carefully and systematically applied to the canvas so that the colors mix and merge in the viewer’s eye. He used this technique in various areas of this canvas, including the foreground bather’s red hat, as well as in other works, including his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884–86). Pointillism was adopted by the painters Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro and had an influence on other artists, including Vincent van Gogh.