In The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe, how is the Historical information discussed?
While he spent most of the year shocking Paris with his novel style and views, Seurat spent his summers painting wistful seascapes. In 1890, he traveled to the tiny port of Gravelines, near the Belgian border, and painted what would be his last four landscapes. That was two fewer paintings than he had produced the summer previous, perhaps because the broad coastal plain, marked only by dunes, was markedly different from his usual Normandy settings. The rise of the summer vacation meant artists found a ready market for seaside images. Unlike older artists such as Monet, though, Seurat preferred utterly prosaic images of ports and shores, rather than more dramatic sunsets and stormy seas. The complete lack of humans, either vacationers or hardworking fishermen, was typical of Seurat's seascapes, which always had a luminous stillness.Seurat's choice of Gravelines was somewhat unusual, given that contemporary guidebooks described it as "an uninteresting town." Its very obscurity may have been a draw for the artist, who was growing protective of his methods. Also, its canal's straight lines lent themselves well to the strictly-organized compositions Seurat preferred.
Gravelines Monet Normandy Paris