But the heat is palpable; Seurat has perfectly captured the visible by-products of the high temperature — the trees in the middle distance dance and shimmer in the sunlight; the haze unites the sky and river in a blur of light; the white clothing, either worn or discarded on the bank dazzles us with reflected light; the occasional dark shadow points up the slightly faded colour of the grass in the intense sunlight.
The bathers in the water and the flaneurs on the bank are caught in a mid-summer ennui, each absorbed in their own reverie, contemplating the river but seemingly unable to break a heat-imposed trance.
Unlike most of his Impressionist contemporaries, Seurat did not achieve these effects by setting up his easel out of doors and creating the finished work en plein air. Apart from anything else the monumental size of the canvas, at over three metres wide, would preclude any such thought.
Instead he worked slowly and painstakingly in the studio putting together the finished composition with the help of a considerable number of drawings and oil studies on panel, many of which were executed in situ. Seurat was therefore working more in the tradition of Poussin and, in particular that immensely influential contemporary, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , a similarity which was noted by contemporary critics.
Or perhaps the girl he likes will have nothing to do with him and he's enduring the misery of young love. Behind him lies a black-haired man with his back to us, leaning his face on his hand. He wears a bowler hat and his shirt has been pulled out of his dark trousers, which provides a long length of white, mirroring the cream of the cutting beyond him. Behind him, looking at the river, sits an orange spaniel.
Seurat is always good at animals. Further up the bank, behind him, we see a pile of clothes - perhaps belonging to the final figure, a boy standing in the river. He is the figure closest to us and, due to Seurat's compositional skill, despite being at the extreme right-hand edge of the canvas, is the focus of the painting. He wears red swimming trunks and a red hat, a blaze of colour against the white of his skin, which helps to direct us to him.
Fingers intertwined, he holds his cupped hands to his lips and his head is slightly raised. He is making some sort of whistling noise - is he calling to people on the other bank? The overall impression is of green the grass , blue the sky, the water , cream and white the bridge and buildings in the background, the sails of the boats, the chalk of the cutting, the white of the men's shirts. The feel is static, unanimated, as the only activities are the ferryman plying his oar in the distance and the boy whistling in the foreground.
These are working men - maybe workers at the factories in the background, there's only one chimney smoking - and this is their day of rest.
But where are the women? In another picture of people on a day off, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte included many women and covered a wide social spectrum. This is just seven men on the banks of the Seine with members of the bourgeoisie being rowed away from them. One must assume this is a deliberate choice for, of course, the women are not tending the home as better-off middle-class girls do.
Like their men folk, they have to work, which must be where they are today. The composition of the painting, the way in which Seurat guides us where to look, is thrilling. There's a series of diagonals, sloping from left to right across the picture and Seurat's use of brown to red directs us unavoidably to the focus - the boy in the red hat standing in the water. Parallel and behind him are the adolescent's red trunks and behind that is the brown cushion, the same auburn as the young man's hair.
The interruption in the green of the grass provided by the cutting also pulls our eyes down, away from the pale-blue sky, away from the white and cream bridge and factories.
Below the cutting, the two piles of clothes and the long white shirt of the man with the bowler hat and the spaniel also move us diagonally down and right. And, of course, the three young men in and close to the water all have pale skins. As mentioned above, Seurat had not perfected his technique of pointillism when he painted this picture in But the great adventure is under way: he uses a number of colours to produce an overall hue. The green of the grass is made up of green, yellow, grey; the teenager's swimming trunks contain orange, pink, blue, the odd streak of black - but the paint is dabbed on.
The tiny dots, for which he must have used a fine brush, do not make their pointillist appearance until two years later and he would use this technique for the rest of his short life. This is a very friendly picture. It is also a very beautiful picture. Nothing is glamorized, nature is not idealized. The figures are ordinary men, not particularly handsome, just men. But there is a luminous quality to it and a tension between the industrial background and these motionless men sitting on the riverbank.
It is life, unidealised, unromanticised. It is also a masterpiece and one of the most imposing works of modern French painting in the National Gallery, London. The meaning of Bathers at Asnieres becomes clearer when viewed alongside ' La Jatte '.
It is certainly no coincidence that the former depicts the working class sunning themselves on the left bank of the Seine, while the latter focuses on the more affluent middle classes enjoying a day out on opposite bank of the river.
It is a tale, in other words, of two classes - both frozen in time, and both imbued with a timeless monumentality. But Seurat finds a new way to paint it — the disciplined fragmentation of his surface lets him see with a new clarity how smoke slips to nothingness, how it is both something and nothing.
The painting depicts working-class men lounging on the riverbank and bathing in the Seine, on an ethereally — and yet emptily — bright day. It is in many ways an enchanted scene. A boy cupping his hands to his mouth, waist high in the glowing water, looks like a triton from some Renaissance or baroque aquatic idyll. The entire painting has the composed grandeur of a fresco or a history painting. But it is so modern: so disconcerting.
On the river, a man in a stovepipe hat sits in a rowing boat that flies the French flag. Is this painting about capitalism, industry, the precious leisure moments of a working class subjected to new disciplines?
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