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Bathers at Asnieres (1884).
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In 1883 he worked on his first major painting,
a huge canvas called Bathers at Asnieres, 1883 (National Gallery,
London). The painting was rejected by the Paris
Salon, and in response Seurat, along with Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilian
Luce, Odilon Redon and Paul Signac founded their own Salon des Indépendents.
The first exhibition was a financial disaster, but Seurat's new painting
technique was the talk of the town. Others tried to copy him, but he guarded
the theory of his new style jealously.
His next major oil painting was La Grande
Jatte. He planned his works well in advance, making hundreds of preparatory
sketches, planning the composition right down to the smallest detail.
For La Grande Jatte, he visited the park every morning at the same
time for months, sketching the visitors and then applying his new observations
to the canvas in the afternoons. When you look at the people in his paintings,
they appear isolated and mute, and this theme of isolation runs throughout
his work.
Other important paintings by Georges Seurat
include: The Forest at Pontaubert (1881, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, NYC); View of the Seine (1882-83, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NYC); The Gardener (1882-3, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC); Saint-Vincent
Street, Montmartre (c.1884, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); View
of Fort Samson, Grandcamp (1885, Hermitage, St. Petersburg); Le
Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp (1885, Tate Collection, London); La Seine
a Courbevoie (c.1885, Private Collection); Models (1886, Barnes Foundation,
Lincoln University); Evening, Honfleur (1886, Museum of Modern
Art, NYC); Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-7, Courtauld Institute Galleries,
London); The Lighthouse at Honfleur (1886, National Gallery of
Art, Washington DC); Gray Weather, Grande Jatte (1888, Philadelphia
Museum of Art); Port-en-Bessin (1888, The Minneapolis Institute
of Arts); Young Woman Powdering Herself (c.1888, Courtauld Institute
Galleries, London); The Eiffel Tower (c.1889, Fine Art Museum of
San Francisco); The Circus (1890-91, Musee d'Orsay, Paris).
He lived with a young model, Madeleine
Knobloch, who gave birth to his son in 1890. As he was such a private
individual, he did not introduce his 'secret' family to his mother until
a few days before his death. He was working on his last ambitious work,
The Circus, 1890 (Musée d'Orsay), when he died. His death
was attributed to a form of meningitis. His parents proposed to gift his
works to the Louvre, who declined, and so they were distributed among
the painter's friends and his common-law wife, Madeleine.
Seurat's theory and practice of colour
in painting was based around the assumption that pigments could be
used to create emotion, in the same way that musicians used various tempos
and sound to create emotion in music. For example, he said that joy could
be achieved by the use of luminous hues, the predominance of warm colours
and the use of lines directed upwards. And on the other hand, sadness
could be achieved by using dark cold colours, and with lines pointing
downwards. And harmony could be established with a balance of warm and
cold colours, and the use of horizontal lines.
His work helped to advance the theory of
Impressionism and opened the way for new possibilities. This was a major
achievement for so young a painter. He was already a complete artist by
the time he turned 25. Although Pointillism is a relatively rigid process,
a weakness which retarded further development of the technique, Seurat’s
work had a significant influence on contemporary Post-Impressionist
painters like the expressionist Van Gogh
(1853-90), the inventor of Synthetism Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903) and the night-club artist Toulouse-Lautrec
(1864-1901).
Paintings by Georges Seurat hang in some
of the best art museums across the world.
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