Description
The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
The Channel of Gravelines is Seurat’s work from the summer of 1890, and it is the palest of our paintings on canvas: the lower two thirds are taken up by a broad plain of pale sand, and above it runs a narrow band of harbour with white houses and terracotta roofs. 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
Left of centre stands a row of low white houses with orange-red roofs, a dark green treetop beside them, and a long pale harbour wall running away to the right. A small sailing boat is moored in front of the wall, its mast thin against the sky, with two dark mooring posts beside it. To the right rises a tall signal mast carrying a small white flag. The lower part of the canvas is a wide, almost even field of sand in cream and pale yellow, crossed only by the faint diagonal trace of shallow water. A small triangle of green bank sits in the bottom left corner. The sky is pale blue-grey and empty.
Seurat’s last summer on the coast
Seurat went to Gravelines in the summer of 1890 and painted four canvases of the channel there. It was the last of the coastal campaigns he had been making every year since 1885; he died the following spring, aged thirty-one. The Gravelines pictures are the quietest of the whole series — fewer boats, fewer figures, more empty water and sand than anything he had painted before. Whether that was a direction he was moving in or simply what the place offered, nobody can say, because there was no summer after it.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 65 cm high and 81 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 81 x 65 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the National Gallery’s own record: dated 1890, oil on canvas, inventory number NG6554. The museum also publishes the full ownership history — from the artist’s mother Ernestine Seurat through his brother-in-law Léon Appert and the Bignou gallery to the dealers Reid & Lefevre in London, then to Samuel Courtauld in 1926, through his daughter Sydney to the Butlers, to Heinz Berggruen in 1986 and to the museum in 1995. The canvas carries a painted border: a band of dark blue-violet dots on all four sides, painted by Seurat himself. It is more pronounced here than on most of his works, and our painter paints it with the rest rather than cropping it away.
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, very light and very calm, so it hangs well where a picture should settle a wall rather than command it — a bedroom, a hallway, or above low furniture. Because the colours are pale it works best against a darker or coloured wall, where the light field separates cleanly; on a white wall it can wash together. 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: | 1890 |
| Original size (width × height): | 81 x 65 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The National Gallery, London (inv. NG6554) |
Gravelines was Seurat’s last summer by the sea. This shelf also carries the Normandy seascape of 1888, three summers earlier, and the boats at low tide at Grandcamp from 1885 — the same coast, the same method, three different years.
