After working all winter on large canvases such as La Grande Jatte, Seurat would cleanse his eyes of the studio, he wrote, “to translate as accurately as possible the bright light” of the coast. For five summers, he took the train from Paris to small ports, prosaic and contained compared with Monet’s wide-open shores. And what he sought is immediately apparent at the Courtauld: visions of marine light, clear, reflective or opalescent, pale at midday, golden in the afternoon, suffused with pink or hazy grey at dusk. In some of the sketches, light does away with the divisions between sea and air.
