Description
Bathers at Asnières – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
Bathers at Asnières is Seurat’s first large canvas, finished in 1884, and among our paintings on canvas it is the biggest after La Grande Jatte. The original is held by the National Gallery in London. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, dot by dot.
What is on the canvas
Working men and boys rest on the grassy bank of the Seine at Asnières, north-west of Paris. A boy in an orange-red cap sits in the water at the right, hands cupped to his mouth, calling across the river. Nearer to us a young man in a straw hat sits with his feet in the water, and behind him a figure lies full length on the bank beside a pile of clothes. Across the water are the factory chimneys of Clichy, and a ferry crosses the middle distance under a bridge. Nobody looks at anybody.
The picture that was refused, and what Seurat did next
The Salon rejected it in 1884. Seurat showed it instead with the newly formed Société des Artistes Indépendants, and then spent the next two years on La Grande Jatte — the same river, the opposite bank, the leisured class instead of the working one. The two are usually read as a pair, and the National Gallery’s own catalogue treats them that way. It is also worth knowing that Seurat went back to this canvas years later and reworked parts of it in the small dots of his mature method, so the surface is not all of one date.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 201 cm high and 301.5 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 301.5 x 201 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the National Gallery’s own record: dated 1884, oil on canvas. Ours is painted in the proportion of the original, in the size you choose — the shelf carries this subject up to three metres wide.
What you receive
The painting is made by our painter by hand, oil on canvas, in the size you choose, and to your own measurements if you prefer. The subject is landscape-format and very wide, so it needs a long wall and a viewing distance — above a sofa, in a dining room, or along a hallway. The figures are large enough to hold at any size on this ladder, and the orange cap gives the eye a fixed point from across a room. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the picture for approval before it leaves the studio. You choose the frame in our 3D application. Every artwork we sell is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1884 |
| Original size (width × height): | 301.5 x 201 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The National Gallery, London |
This shelf also carries the companion picture Seurat painted next — the Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, the same river seen from the other bank — and Les Poseuses, the studio canvas that followed it.
