Georges Seurat – Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass (Paysanne assise dans l’herbe)

Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting

Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass is an early Seurat, painted in 1883, and among our paintings on canvas it is one of the calmest: a single figure resting in a field, with no story attached to her. The original belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

A woman sits low in the grass, seen from behind and a little to one side, her back rounded and her head turned away so that her face is never shown. She wears a dark jacket and a pale headscarf, and she is set against a field that fills the whole picture — no horizon, no sky, no path. The grass is laid on in short crossed strokes of green, yellow-green and rust, so the ground reads as texture rather than as distance. The figure is small in the frame and close in tone to the field around her, and that is what makes the picture so quiet.

An early work, painted before the dots

This was painted in 1883, before the technique Seurat is remembered for existed. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, the canvas that introduced his divided colour to the public, was worked on from 1884 to 1886. Here the paint is still applied in short crossed brushstrokes in the manner he had learned from the Barbizon painters and from Millet, whose peasant subjects stand directly behind this one. That is a good reason to look at it: it shows what Seurat could already do before he invented the method that made him famous.

A note on the original

The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 38.1 cm high and 46.2 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 46.2 x 38.1 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s own record, accession 37.714, dated 1883. It is a small picture in landscape format, and we keep that proportion at every size.

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 colours are earth colours — greens, ochres and rust — so it settles into a room instead of dominating it, and the wide shape suits the space above a sideboard or a bed. 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.

Seurat painted the countryside and the people working in it all through these first years, before Paris and before the dots. This shelf carries another of them, painted the summer before in the forest at Barbizon, and the large bathing scene of 1884 with which he first showed his ambition in public.

• Figure in a Landscape at Barbizon
• Bathers at Asnières