The Harbor at Honfleur

Seurat painted this harbor at Honfleur in the summer of 1886. He was 27, and he had just completed A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, the painting that established Pointillism as a movement. He spent the summer at Honfleur, a port on the Normandy coast, and painted six views of the harbor and the coast. This is one of the largest and most finished of the group. The harbor at Honfleur stretches across the painting, its water calm and flat. A few boats lie at anchor, their masts visible against the sky. The buildings of the town line the far shore, their forms simplified into blocks of color. The sky is pale, with thin clouds rendered in tiny dots of white and blue. The water is built in thousands of small dots of blue, green, and grey, with the reflections of the boats and the buildings visible as patterns of color on the surface. Seurat invented Pointillism in 1884 and 1885, building on the color theory of Michel-Eugene Chevreul. The idea was simple: instead of mixing colors on the palette, the painter places small dots of pure color side by side on the canvas. The viewer's eye mixes the colors optically, producing a brighter, more luminous result than mixed paint. Seurat believed this was a scientific approach to painting, and he spent years refining the technique. The Honfleur paintings are more relaxed than La Grande Jatte. Seurat was on vacation, painting the sea for the first time, and the harbor scenes have a calm and openness that the crowded park scene does not. The dots are larger, the colors are cooler, and the compositions are simpler. The paintings were well received when they were exhibited in Paris in the fall of 1886, and they helped establish Seurat's reputation as the leader of the Neo-Impressionist movement. Seurat was born in Paris in 1859. He trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and served in the army at Brest, where he first saw the sea. He returned to Paris and began developing Pointillism in 1881. He produced about 50 paintings in his career, working slowly and deliberately on each one. He died in 1891 at the age of 31, cutting short a career that might have transformed French painting. Oil on canvas, 65 by 81 centimeters, roughly 26 by 32 inches. Seurat painted with tiny dots of color, each one placed with precision. The surface is smooth, with no visible brushwork, but up close the painting is a field of small colored circles. The harbor scene is built entirely from these dots, with the boats, the buildings, and the water all rendered in the same technique. The horizontal format and cool palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or bedroom with modern furniture. The harbor subject suits a room with blue or grey-toned walls. A white frame keeps the painting's soft palette clear. The 12x16 or 16x20 size gives the dots and the harbor enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the National Gallery in London. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.