A bid at the scale of kings

Picture the most modest thing a summer afternoon contains: a few young men and boys who have walked down to the river, stripped to their underclothes, and flopped on the bank to cool off. Nobody paints that. And nobody, certainly, paints it nearly ten feet wide, at the size the official art world kept locked away for gods, generals, and the deaths of kings. That is the picture you are about to look at. A working-class day at the water, blown up to the dimensions of a coronation.

The painter was Georges Seurat (1859–1891), and in 1883 he was twenty-three years old, freshly out of the École des Beaux-Arts (the official Paris art school) and his military service, with a great deal of ambition and almost no reputation. This was to be his first monumental canvas, his bid to walk into serious art at full scale and announce himself. Most young men make that bid with a battle or a goddess. Seurat made it with a riverbank.

The spot is real and specific: the bank of the Seine at Asnières (ah-nee-AIR), a working-class suburb on the western edge of Paris. This is the detail that makes the picture modern rather than mythical. Across the water, thin factory chimneys at Clichy stand smoking on the horizon; a railway bridge crosses the river in the background; and off to the right sits the tip of the Île de la Grande Jatte, the island that would be the subject of Seurat’s very next huge canvas. These are not nymphs in Arcadia. They are clerks and laborers, some of them still in their day clothes, taking the rest that an industrial city grudgingly allows.

That is the quiet provocation. Seurat did not dress an ordinary scene up into a myth, and he did not paint a myth and pretend it was ordinary. He took exactly what was there, the smoke and the bridge and the bored bodies on the grass, and granted it the full seriousness and the full square footage that art had always reserved for its betters.