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.

Opposite is the island of la Grande Jatte, the east tip of which is shown as the slope and the trees to the right, and which Seurat has pictorially extended beyond its actual length.

Writing about these effects, the art historian Roger Fry reported his view that “no one could render this enveloping with a more exquisitely tremulous sensibility, a more penetrating observation or more unfailing consistency, than Seurat”.

Seurat however, elected not to make the real or imagined plight of the suburban workers his concern, instead portraying the labouring class and petit-bourgeoisie of Asnières and Courbevoie with dignity, and in a scene of lazy leisure.

It was in the late nineteenth century a break with practice to use painting on this scale in this way, but Bathers at Asnières carries this unusual message with no note of incivility or incongruity.

[9] Not only did Seurat decline to make absolutely clear the social status of the major figures in Bathers, but neither did he show them performing a public role of any kind.

In spite of the unglamorous function and appearance of these recent additions to suburban Paris, they are painted as subtly variegated and somewhat classicised masses—veiled by the heat haze, and surrounded by trees at each side.

[11] Whereas for the most part Seurat used these oil studies to work through his compositional problems, nine extant drawings in conté crayon show him focusing individually on each of the five main figures in the painting.

Among these fresco painters was Piero della Francesca, whose Resurrection depicts a sleeping guard at the bottom-left sharing a number of features with the seated man in Bathers at Asnières.

The curvature of slumping back and bent legs is clearly matched in both figures, and indeed the posture also appears in the Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea of Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, a painting with which any student at the École would have been familiar.

[12] Further, Blanc had written a book in 1867, which Seurat read the year he began his studies at the École, and which was to strongly influence him during his formative years—the Grammaire des arts du dessin.

Near the beginning of this book, Blanc had claimed that Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses was an exemplary case of how art should idealise nature, concluding his passage, "This is how a scene from everyday life suddenly becomes raised to the dignity of a history painting."

In both paintings a prominent figure breaks into the horizon just off-centre, a curved sail appears in almost the same spot to the right, and triangular poses are observed, as are boys in varying degrees of rest.

[14][15][16] William I. Homer, in addressing the light hues and matte surface of the Bathers, remarked that its, “pale and somewhat chalky tonality... recalls the earlier decorations of [Puvis].”[17][18] Although a receptive and conscientious student at the revered École, Seurat had been open to ideas from some more esoteric sources too.

In 1879, with his friend, fellow École student, and future portrait-subject Edmond Aman-Jean, Seurat attended the fourth exhibition of paintings from the then very unrevered Impressionist painters, where they duly received an “unexpected and profound shock”.

[23] In 1886 Paul Durand-Ruel took the picture, along with some three hundred other canvases, to the National Academy of Design in New York, where he held his exhibition of the “Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris.”[24] The painting received mixed reviews from critics and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.

[32][33] The Art Amateur’s anonymous reviewer of the New York exhibition—who even explicitly likened Bathers at Asnières to Italian fresco painting—also called the picture a modern ‘Impressionist’ work.

Paul Signac remarked that the Bathers was painted ‘...[I]n great flat strokes, brushed one over the other, fed by a palette composed, like Delacroix’s, of pure and earthy colours.

But the understanding of the laws of contrast, the methodical separation of elements—light, shade, local colour, and the interaction of colours—as well as their proper balance and proportion gave this canvas its perfect harmony.’[34] Less flatteringly, an anonymous reviewer of Durand-Ruel’s Impressionist Exhibition in New York City wrote in the newspaper The Sun that, “The great master, from his own point of view, must surely be Seurat whose monstrous picture of The Bathers consumes so large a part of the Gallery D. This is a picture conceived in a coarse, vulgar, and commonplace mind, the work of a man seeking distinction by the vulgar qualification and expedient of size.

A contentious theory suggests that these elements were added by Seurat as a means of making a connection between the Bathers and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The late additions in Bathers bring for the first time a note of vitality to the serene picture in keeping with the more "sociable" climate of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.