Maybe so, but there was nothing revolutionary in Seurat's training as an artist. Born into a comfortable middle-class family, he studied art and color theory at a municipal school in Paris before entering the conservative Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878. After leaving the Ecole in 1879 for a year of military service in Brest, Seurat returned to Paris with notebooks—four of which are on view at MoMA—filled with sketches drawn from life. His early drawings look back a generation to Millet in paying tribute to the simple dignity of peasant labor, of which Seurat knew nothing. The real work of a carelessly drawn picture like Harvester, with its safe nostalgia, lies in the way he fills the sheet with the balanced form of the farmer pitched above the hastily scrawled field.