MURA · THE COLLECTION · GEORGES SEURAT

Final Study for "Bathers at Asnières"

This small oil on panel, 15.8 by 25.1 cm, is Georges Seurat's last preparatory study for Bathers at Asnières, the large canvas of 1884 now in the National Gallery, London. Painted in 1883, it shows men and boys on the bank of the Seine outside Paris. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Georges Seurat · 1883 · Oil on panel · Neo-Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum describes men and boys resting on the riverbank at Asnières, a working-class suburb of Paris, directly across the water from the leisure park Seurat later painted in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The gestures are frozen and the poses sedate, a mood the museum contrasts with the sparkling riverside scenes the Impressionists preferred. The spot is in fact in Courbevoie, just west of Asnières; the Asnières railway bridge and the factories of Clichy lie in the background of the finished picture, and the eastern tip of La Grande Jatte appears at the right.

How it was painted

Seurat, born in Paris in 1859, had been a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, which taught that a large painting must be preceded by extensive studies. César de Hauke's catalogue lists fourteen oil studies for the Bathers, most of them painted outdoors. This one, from 1883, is the last, and it is very close to the final composition except in size. Seurat called such small panels his croquetons, little sketches, and hung them on the walls of his studio. He worked on the big canvas through 1883 and finished it in 1884, at 24. The Salon jury rejected it, so he showed it with the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. The museum points out that the study already shows what the young painter took from Impressionism: a subject from modern life, a luminous palette and airy brushwork.

Where it went

Seurat gave the panel to the writer Robert Caze, who died in 1886, and it passed to his widow Louise. It later belonged to W. H. Sprenger in Paris and Essen, then to Wildenstein and Co. in New York by 1948. David M. and Adele R. Levy of New York bought it in 1949, and it came to the Art Institute in 1962 as a gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund. It was shown in the Seurat retrospective in Chicago and New York in 1958, in Seurat and the Bathers at the National Gallery, London, in 1997, and in Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte in Chicago in 2004. It hangs in Gallery 240.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Impressionist Life collection with a serene mood: a quiet riverside afternoon in loose, luminous strokes.