This oil sketch, painted in 1884, is a preparatory study for Georges Seurat's monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, made before he adopted the fully systematic pointillist technique for which the finished canvas is known; the brushwork here is looser and more exploratory, closer to conventional Impressionist handling. As a study, the picture offers a rare view into Seurat's working process — how a composition of that scale and ambition was tested and refined before its final, highly controlled execution. It entered the collection through the bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn in 1951, joining a collection notable for its depth in late nineteenth-century French painting. Scion regards preparatory studies of this kind, when their relationship to a documented final work is established, as carrying scholarly interest distinct from finished exhibition pieces.