The Channel of Gravelines

Detail from The Channel of Gravelines: An EveningThe Courtauld exhibition Seurat and the Sea is well worth getting to - not cheap, but of course it gets you access to the splendours of the permanent collection and there are many pictures you would normally have to travel a long way to see. The painting below was borrowed from MOMA, the study for it is usually in the Pompidou Centre and the conte crayon sketch is part of a collection of drawings owned by Jack Shear, the American curator and head of the Elsworth Kelly Foundation. These views were all executed in the last summer before Seurat's untimely death and it is sad to think that if he had lived as long as Matisse or Picasso he would have been around for abstract art and surrealism. One of my favourite paintings in London dates from the same summer, the Courtauld's The Beach at Gravelines, an astonishingly abstract composition, apparently painted for his own pleasure as it serves no purpose as a preparatory study.Georges Seurat,…