The Bathers

Bathers at Asnieres, 1884, by George Seurat (1859-1891)

Dylan Perring, our young and talented guest is an eleven year old boy who's school was entered into a competition set by the National Gallery, London, in which pupils were given the challenge to re create the well known painting titled "Bathers at Asnieres, 1884" by George Seurat (1859-1891). The medium was up to the individual, some students used paints, collages, printing and photography. All students submitted their pieces and Dylan's was judged to be the winner. Dylan's picture was briefly hung in the portrait gallery alongside the other fortune few.

Bathers at Asnières (French: Une Baignade, Asnières) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Georges Pierre Seurat, the first of his two masterpieces on the monumental scale. The canvas is of a suburban, but placid Parisian riverside scene. Isolated figures, with their clothes piled sculpturally on the riverbank, together with trees, austere boundary walls and buildings, and the River Seine are presented in a formal layout. A combination of complex brushstroke techniques, and a meticulous application of contemporary colour theory bring to the composition a sense of gentle vibrancy and timelessness.

Seurat completed the painting of Bathers at Asnières in 1884, when he was twenty-four years old. He applied to the jury of the Salon of the same year to have the work exhibited there, but the jury rejected it. The Bathers continued to puzzle many of Seurat’s contemporaries, and the picture was not widely acclaimed until many years after the death of the artist at the age of just thirty-one. An appreciation of the painting’s merits grew during the twentieth century, and today it hangs in the National Gallery, London, where it is considered one of the highlights of the gallery’s collection of paintings.[1