#summer

Wikipedia has this down as the earliest painting of his that anyone knows about, done when he was seventeen, out by a stream near Le Havre. It's signed with the name Oscar — apparently that was the first half of his actual name, and he dropped it in his twenties.

Apparently this was one of six paintings a merchant banker in Antwerp commissioned to track the months of the year — this one's high summer. Only five are known to survive.

Small oil studies like this were the everyday output for painters of his school — knocked out fast on a board, often outdoors, and plenty of them were never meant to be finished pictures at all. A good number got sold anyway, and a good number ended up in collections.

Apparently he spent summer after summer painting people idling by the New England shore — same trees, same water, a different crowd each time. They say he made dozens of these and barely changed the recipe.

That's the same island from the enormous Sunday-crowd picture everyone knows — he kept going back to it. The dots supposedly weren't just a look: he'd been reading up on how colours mix in your eye instead of on the palette, and a handful of other painters ran with the idea until it was a whole movement with a name.