Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat (born December 2, 1859, Paris, France—died March 29, 1891, Paris) was a painter and founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colors became known as Pointillism. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure color too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade, Asnières (1883–84; Bathers at Asnières) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884–86).

Georges was the son of Antoine-Chrisostôme Seurat, a 44-year-old property owner, originally from Champagne, and Ernestine Faivre, a Parisienne. His father, a singular personality who had been a bailiff, spent most of his time in Le Raincy, where he owned a cottage with a garden (in which Seurat often painted). The young Seurat lived primarily in Paris with his mother, his brother Émile, and his sister Marie-Berthe. At the time of the Paris Commune, in 1871, when Paris rebelled against the French state and set up its own government, the prudent family temporarily withdrew to Fontainebleau.

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While attending school, Georges began to draw, and, beginning in 1875, he took a course from a sculptor, Justin Lequien. He officially entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878, in the class of Henri Lehmann, a disciple of J.-A.-D. Ingres, who painted portraits and conventional nudes. In the school library Seurat discovered a book that was to inspire him for the rest of his life: the Essai sur les signes inconditionnels de l’art (1827; “Essay on the Unmistakable Signs of Art”), by Humbert de Superville, a painter-engraver from Geneva; it dealt with the future course of aesthetics and with the relationship between lines and images. Seurat was also impressed with the work of another Genevan aesthetician, David Sutter, who combined mathematics and musicology. Throughout his brief career, Seurat manifested an unusually strong interest in the intellectual and scientific bases of art.

In November 1879, at the age of 20, Seurat went to Brest to do his military service. There he drew the sea, beaches, and boats. When he returned to Paris the following autumn, he shared a studio with another painter, Édmond-François Aman-Jean, who then joined him in Lehmann’s class. But Seurat and Aman-Jean departed from the policies of the École des Beaux-Arts in admiring the warm landscapes of Jean-Baptiste Millet at the Louvre. The two friends often frequented dance halls and cabarets in the evening, and in spring they took the passenger steamer to the island of La Grande Jatte, the setting of Seurat’s future paintings. Seurat exhibited at the official Salon—the state-sponsored annual exhibition—for the first time in 1883. He displayed portraits of his mother and of his friend Aman-Jean, and in that same year he began his studies, sketches, and panels for Bathers at Asnières. When the picture was refused by the jury of the Salon in 1884, Seurat decided to participate in the foundation of the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants, an association “with neither jury nor prizes,” where he showed his Bathers in June.

During this period, he had seen and been strongly influenced by the monumental symbolic paintings of Puvis de Chavannes. He also met the 100-year-old chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul and experimented with Chevreul’s theories of the chromatic circle of light and studied the effects that could be achieved with the three primary colors (yellow, red, and blue) and their complements. Seurat fell in with Paul Signac, who was to become his chief disciple, and painted many rough sketches on small boards in preparation for his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884. In December 1884 he exhibited the Bathers again, with the Société des Artistes Indépendents, which was to be of immense influence in the development of modern art.

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Seurat spent the winter of 1885 working on the island of La Grande Jatte and the summer at Grandcamp, in Normandy. The Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, who was temporarily converted to the technique of Pointillism, was introduced to Seurat by Signac during this period. Seurat finished the painting La Grande Jatte and exhibited it from May 15 to June 15, 1886, at an Impressionist group show. This picture demonstration of his technique aroused great interest. Seurat’s chief artistic associates at this time, painters also concerned with the effects of light on color, were Signac and Pissarro. The unexpectedness of his art and the novelty of his conception excited the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. The critic Félix Fénéon praised Seurat’s method in an avant-garde review. And Seurat’s work was exhibited by the eminent dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris and in New York City.

In 1887, while he was temporarily living in a garret studio, Seurat began work on Les Poseuses. This painting was to be the last of his compositions on the grand scale of the Bathers and La Grande Jatte; he thought about adding a Place Clichy to this number but abandoned the idea. In the following year he completed Les Poseuses and also Parade de cirque. In February 1888 he went to Brussels with Signac for a private viewing of the exposition of the Twenty (XX), a small group of independent artists, in which he showed seven canvases, including La Grande Jatte.

Seurat participated in the 1889 Salon des Indépendants, exhibiting landscapes. He painted Signac’s portrait at this time. His residence at this point was in the Pigalle district, where he lived with his 21-year-old mistress, Madeleine Knobloch. On February 16, 1890, Madeleine presented him with a son, whom he officially acknowledged and entered in the register of births under the name of Pierre-Georges Seurat. During that year Seurat completed the painting Le Chahut, which he sent to the exhibition of the Twenty (XX) in Brussels. During that period he also painted the Jeune Femme se poudrant, a portrait of his mistress, though he continued to conceal his liaison with her even from his most intimate friends. He spent that summer at Gravelines, near Dunkirk, where he painted several landscapes and planned what was to be his last painting, Le Cirque.

As if from some sort of premonition of his impending death, Seurat showed the uncompleted Cirque at the eighth Salon des Indépendants. As an organizer of the exhibition, he exhausted himself in the presentation and hanging of the works. He caught a chill, developed infectious angina, and, before the exhibition was ended, he died on Easter Sunday 1891. On the following day Madeleine Knobloch presented herself at the town hall of her district to identify herself as the mother of Pierre-Georges Seurat. The child, who had contracted his father’s contagious illness, died April 13, 1891. Seurat was buried in the family vault at Père Lachaise cemetery. In addition to his seven monumental paintings, he left 40 smaller paintings and sketches, about 500 drawings, and several sketchbooks. Though a modest output in terms of quantity, they show him to have been among the foremost painters of one of the greatest periods in the history of art.