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Etude dans l'Ile with aprocryphal signature and date oil on cradled panel 6 1/8 x 9 7/8 in. (15.7 x 25.1 cm.) Painted circa 1883 PROVENANCE Alfred Halvorsen. Rolf de Mar‚, Paris. M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York. LITERATURE C.M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, Paris, 1961, vol. I, p. 42, no. 73 (illustrated, p. 43). J. Focarino, ed., and F. Daulte, intro., Privately owned Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of Fran‡ois L. Schwarz, New York, 1974, p. 60 (illustrated, p. 61; as Study on the Grande Jatte ). EXHIBITION (possibly) New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Seurat, Paintings and Drawings, Loan Exhibition for the Benefit of the Home for the Destitute Blind, April-May 1949, no. 63. NOTES Georges Seurat painted his oil sketches sur le motif on small panels that were typically 6 x 9 in. (16 x 23 cm.) in size. He called these panels " croquetons " and often used them to develop his larger compositions in his studio. In this way, Seurat modified, but did not entirely break with, the plein-air practices of the Impressionists. "He chose the site and familiarized himself with the landscape; then he set human beings into it, apparently random figures but actually based on the subjects suggested to him by his numerous visits to the place. Thus he assembled all the data for his large canvas" (J. Rewald, Seurat, New York, 1990, p. 51). These small works were not merely a means to an end, however. "The execution of these little paintings, which leave the motions of the hand visible, gives them an evident modernity; and it is just this resolute search of an exclusive pictorial truth that accounts for their marvelous freshness. His croquetons are independent of any more ambitious projects. They are works in their own right" (A. Madeleine-Perdrillat, Seurat, Geneva, 1990, pp. 36-38). Etude dans l'Ile is typical of Seurat's work from the years 1884-1886, when he was making studies for his large-scale masterpiece Un Dimanche d'Et‚ … l'Ile de La Grande Jatte (coll. The Art Institute of Chicago). The high horizon line, the layering of light and shadow along the painting's diagonal axis in the form of triangles which progressively decrease in size, and the horizontal and vertical structure created by the embankment across the Seine and the trees on the island are compositional devices in the present painting that are repeated in other pictures. Within this compositional framework, Seurat evolved an increasingly scientific and systematic approach to the depiction of light and form by using a divisionist technique in his application of color. John Rewald notes, "In spite of all the physical experiments on which he based his technique, it might even be said that the luminosity achieved in these small panels sometimes surpasses that of the larger canvases, possibly because of their greater concentration" (J. Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism, New York, 1986, p. 161).