Description
Boats, Low Tide, Grandcamp – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
Boats, Low Tide is one of the marines Seurat painted at Grandcamp on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1885, and among our paintings on canvas it is one of the lightest: boats resting on the sand, waiting for the sea to come back. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
At low tide the boats settle on the bottom and lean over, their masts pointing in different directions. Behind them the wet sand reflects the sky and the waterline runs away almost horizontally. The colour is very pale — pink sand, weak blues, the faintest greens — with a few dark accents in the hulls. There is not a single figure. It is a picture about emptiness and waiting, not about the work of fishermen.
The summer at Grandcamp
In the summer of 1885 Seurat left Paris for the Normandy coast and painted a series of marines at Grandcamp. They were begun in front of the motif and finished in the studio, and they show the moment his dotted technique moved from figures to landscape: here the dots hold together a diffuse light with no hard shadows. The series does not tell one story — it is the same stretch of coast under different conditions, with related choices of composition.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas, painted in 1885 at Grandcamp in Normandy. We state width first and then height, and the table below gives the measurements in that order. The place is Grandcamp on the Calvados coast — a small fishing harbour where the sea withdraws a long way and leaves the bay dry twice a day.
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. It is a pale, restful picture, which suits a wall that gets little daylight, a bedroom, or a large bathroom. The soft tones are easy to place and do not impose a colour on the 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: | 1885 |
| Original size: | 80.3 cm x 64.4 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Lafevre Gallery, London |
The sea is a large part of Seurat’s work. This shelf also carries the harbour at Port-en-Bessin and the channel at Gravelines, painted on the same coast in the years that followed.
