I like to be near water. My London office is only two minutes’ walk from the Thames at Waterloo Bridge, and my headquarters in Nottingham are close to the Trent. Once these rivers carried a lot of industrial traffic. They ‘re quieter nowadays, but their life is still fascinating, and on a fine day people still love to sit on the bank, just as they ‘ve done for centuries.

I love the sound of water, whether it’s a fountain, the sea or a stream running over rocks. There’s no sound in Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres, but there are other things going on. Quite a lot of things, actually. There’s the sense of peacefulness enfolding the figures sitting and lying on the bank of the Seine in the sunshine, contrasting with the boy in the water, who’s blowing into his hands-perhaps the water is colder than it looks-and the alertness of the little dog, who, like all dogs, is hoping for a bit of excitement.

Seurat painted it in 1884, when he was 25 years old. Although he hadn’t yet developed the technique of pointillism for which he became famous, you can see him trying out the technique in this painting, which was his first large-scale composition.

But there’s something else here, something that speaks louder to us in the 21st century than it did to those who first saw it in the 19th, when the paint was still fresh. In the background there’s a factory, with tall chimneys belching dark smoke into the clear air, staining the blue sky. The bathers seem oblivious. They don’t know of course, that the Industrial Revolution will be the event in world history that sets off the phenomenon of climate change. Whatever our views about global warming, we can’t afford to be so oblivious today.