The Rue St. Vincent, Paris, in Spring

Painted in 1884 and now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, this view of the Rue Saint-Vincent—one of the winding streets that climb the Montmartre butte—belongs to the critical transitional year when Seurat was completing 'Bathers at Asnières' and beginning preliminary work on 'La Grande Jatte.' The painting of the quiet, tree-lined street in spring, with its blossoming vegetation, shows Seurat testing his emerging colour system on a simpler, more intimate subject than the monumental figure compositions. The Fitzwilliam canvas demonstrates the poetic potential of his method at small scale.

The spring foliage offers a test for Seurat's emerging divisionist approach: rendering the varied greens of young leaves through carefully differentiated colour dots applied to allow optical mixing. The warm spring light is captured through complementary warm-cool contrasts distributed across the composition.