Description
Georges Seurat, Farm Women at Work (1882–83)
The subject of Farm Women at Work is not a face but a task. Two women bend over a field, their heads down and turned away, and Seurat gives the painting to the work rather than to the workers. He made it in 1882–83, before the dots, and the original hangs in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Two bent backs
Neither woman looks up. What identifies them is a white cap, a blue smock and the angle of a spine held over a row. Seurat keeps them small in the field, so the eye reads the labour first and the figures second.
An early hand
The paint goes on in short crisscross strokes – the balayé that Seurat used before he broke colour into points. Millet and the Barbizon painters are visible here in a way they are not in the later work.
The original
Oil on canvas, 46 × 38.7 cm, painted 1882–83. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift; accession 41.713.
How yours is made
Every canvas we supply is a hand-painted oil painting, not a print. A painter works it stroke by stroke at the size you choose, which is why no two orders are ever identical.
If you know Seurat only from the pointillist canvases, this is where the method had not yet arrived.
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