The launch of Neo-Impressionism

Seurat died young, at thirty-one, in 1891, with the Bathers still essentially in the family’s keeping. Its early champion was Félix Fénéon, the critic who actually coined the word “Neo-Impressionism” for what Seurat and his circle were doing, and who acquired the canvas around 1900. The intermediate owners between the family and Fénéon are not fully pinned, so treat him as the key early collector rather than the whole chain.

The picture left France for good in 1924, bought for the British national collection through the Courtauld Fund (the money the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld set aside to bring French modern art into British public galleries). It hung first at the Tate, then crossed to the National Gallery in London in 1961, where it is a centerpiece today. You can stand in front of all ten feet of it any day the gallery is open.

The Bathers reads now as the launch of Neo-Impressionism and as the prelude to its more famous sibling, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86, the Art Institute of Chicago), which Seurat painted next, on the very island you can see at the right edge of this canvas. The two pictures are a matched pair: the same suburb, the same Sunday leisure, the second one carrying the dot technique the first only sampled. They are also a deliberate study in social geography, the Bathers showing working-class men cooling off on the south bank while La Grande Jatte shows the bourgeoisie at their leisure on the island across the same river.

And the show it helped found outlived everyone. The jury-free Indépendants became, for decades, the place where the new thing in French art could be seen first. A picture the official Salon rejected ended up naming a method, anchoring a museum, and opening a door. Not bad for an afternoon by the river.