Description
Boys Bathing – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
Boys Bathing is one of the small panels Seurat painted outdoors while he was preparing Bathers at Asnières, and among our paintings on canvas it is one of the smallest originals we reproduce: a few figures at the water’s edge, laid down in an afternoon. The original is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
Two or three figures sit and stand at the edge of the Seine, painted very small against a wide bank of grass and water. Nobody is given a face. The bank is laid on in broad horizontal strokes of green and ochre, the water in blue-grey, and the figures are little more than warm marks the size of a fingernail. The picture is wider than it is tall by a long way, so the eye travels along it rather than into it.
A study made outdoors, for a picture made indoors
Seurat painted dozens of these small panels on the riverbank at Asnières in 1883 and 1884, carrying them home to build the two-by-three-metre canvas that made his name. They were never meant to be exhibited. That is exactly why they are worth looking at: the brushwork is quick and unguarded, and you can see the painter deciding where the light sits before he commits it to a large surface. The finished Bathers is calm and monumental; this is the working note behind it.
A note on the original
The original is a small panel painted from life in 1883–84 and held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. We state width first and then height, and the table below gives the measurements in that order. Our reproduction is hand-painted on canvas, in the proportion of the original and in the size you choose — so the picture can be given the scale the study never had.
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 shape is long and low, which makes it useful where a tall picture will not go: above a door, along a corridor, or over a bed. The colours are summer colours, greens and warm sand, so it lifts a plain wall without dominating it. 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: | 1883-1884 |
| Original size: | 25 cm x 16 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on wood |
| Located: | Musée d’Orsay, Paris |
This shelf carries the large canvas these studies were made for, and another landscape from the same early years.
