Georges Seurat – Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy

Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting

Seascape at Port-en-Bessin is Seurat’s work from the summer of 1888, and among our paintings on canvas it is one of the most open: a green headland falls diagonally from left to right, calm sea opens behind it, and the sky is pale, cream-coloured and banded with blue-grey cloud. The original is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, dot by dot.

What is on the canvas

The left half of the canvas is taken up by the grassy slope of a headland, descending to the right and ending in a low, pinkish-grey cliff above the water. Two thin poles stand on the crest at the upper left. To the right of the cliff lies the sea: pale blue-green, without waves, with a thin brighter line at the horizon and a single small dark vessel far out. At the lower right the slope opens into an ochre band of dry grass. The sky occupies the upper third and is the brightest part of the picture – peach and cream, crossed by horizontal blue-grey bands. There is no figure anywhere, no building, no story.

Why Seurat spent his summers on the Channel coast

Every year between 1885 and 1890 Seurat left Paris for the coast, and each summer produced a group of marines. Port-en-Bessin was the 1888 campaign. The reason was practical as much as artistic: the coast gave him large, quiet areas – water, sky, grass – on which his method could be tested without the complication of figures. In the studio he was building crowded scenes full of people; on the coast he was doing the opposite, and the sea paintings are where the technique is at its clearest, because there is nothing else in them to look at.

A note on the original

The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 65.1 cm high and 80.9 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 80.9 x 65.1 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the National Gallery of Art’s own record: dated 1888, oil on canvas, accession number 1972.9.21. The museum also publishes the painting’s full ownership history – from the artist’s mother through his brother-in-law Léon Appert and his son Léopold to Félix Fénéon in 1924, then in September 1937 to Marie N. Harriman in New York, and in 1972 as a gift to the museum. The canvas carries a painted border: a band of dark blue-violet dots running along all four sides, painted by Seurat himself. Because that border is part of the painting, our painter paints it with the rest and does not crop 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, wide and calm, with no narrative, so it hangs well above a sofa, above a bed, or on a longer wall where it has room to open out. Because the colours are light and low in saturation, it works best on a quiet, pale 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.

Seurat spent the summers between 1885 and 1890 on the Channel coast and brought home a series of marines each year. This shelf also carries a canvas from Grandcamp painted in 1885 – the same coast, three years earlier, and the same absence of figures. For the contrast with his largest peopled scene, the Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte stands here too.

• Boats, Low Tide, Grandcamp
• Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte