Painting and Sculpture

Bathers at Asnières

Bathers at Asnières (French: Une Baignade, Asnières) is an 1884 oil on canvas painting by the French artist Georges Pierre Seurat, the first of his two masterpieces on the monumental scale. The canvas is of a suburban, placid Parisian riverside scene. Isolated figures, with their clothes piled sculpturally on the riverbank, together with trees, austere boundary walls and buildings, and the River Seine are presented in a formal layout. A combination of complex brushstroke techniques and a meticulous application of contemporary color theory bring to the composition a sense of gentle vibrancy and timelessness. Seurat completed the painting of Bathers at Asnières in 1884, at 24 years old. He applied to the jury of the Salon of the same year to have the work exhibited there, only to be rejected. The Bathers continued to puzzle many of Seurat’s contemporaries, and the picture would only be widely acclaimed many years after the artist's death at age 31. An appreciation of the piece's merits grew during the twentieth century; today it hangs in the National Gallery, London, where it is considered a highlight of the gallery’s collection of paintings.

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See also

• ▸Landscape with the Good Samaritan
• ▸History of disco
• ▸Bascove

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.