Description
The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort-Philippe – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort-Philippe is Seurat’s work from the summer of 1890, and it is the most spatially built of our paintings on canvas: a jetty curves out of the lower right corner into the distance, and a dark mooring bollard stands beside it, holding the whole scene together. The original is held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, dot by dot.
What is on the canvas
A broad pink-ochre jetty begins at the lower right and sweeps in a shallow curve towards the middle distance. Standing on it, close to the bottom edge, is a low dark mooring bollard — the only genuinely dark object in the picture. To the left of the jetty runs the channel: pale blue-green water with several moored boats lying almost flat on it. Low white houses line the far bank, and a pale lighthouse rises above them. Thin masts are scattered along the horizon. The sky is pale, faintly yellow, and empty.
The fourth Gravelines canvas — and the only one with a foreground
Seurat painted four canvases of this channel in the summer of 1890, and this is the only one in which he put something solid in the foreground. The bollard is small, but because it is dark and close it sets the scale for everything behind it, and the jetty’s curve then carries the eye all the way to the lighthouse. The other three Gravelines pictures are flat, quiet and almost without incident; this one is built. If you want to see how Seurat made depth without a single perspective line, this is the canvas that shows it.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 73 cm high and 92.7 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 92.7 x 73 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the Indianapolis museum’s own record: dated 1890, oil on canvas, accession number 45.195. The museum also publishes the full ownership history — with the dealers Reid & Lefevre in London by 1926, with the Bignou Gallery in New York by 1937, with M. Knoedler & Co. in New York by 1945, purchased in June 1945 by Caroline Marmon Fesler of Indianapolis and given by her to the museum the same year. Our reproduction’s proportions agree with the museum’s measurement to within a tenth of a percent.
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 wide with a clear diagonal, so it hangs well above a longer piece of furniture — a sofa, a sideboard, or in a dining room where the curve of the jetty has room to open out. Because the foreground carries a dark accent, it also holds up against a lighter wall. 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): | 92.7 x 73 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (inv. 45.195) |
Seurat painted four canvases of this channel in the summer of 1890. Two of them are on this shelf: this one, with the jetty and the bollard, and the quieter Grand Fort-Philippe canvas where the same water lies almost without incident. For the Normandy coast two years earlier, the Port-en-Bessin seascape stands here too.
