Georges Seurat (1859-1891)

One of the most famous artists of the Impressionist era, the short-lived French painter Georges Seurat is noted for his invention of the colourist technique known as Pointillism, a form of Divisionism, in which colours are placed side-by-side on the canvas and 'mixed' by the eye, rather than being mixed beforehand by the painter. In so doing, he laid the foundations for Neo-Impressionism.

Proficient in most painting genres, Seurat is best known for his large-scale works of modern life and city parks. His people tend to look stiff because they were painted according to worked out theories, rather than based on what he saw.

La Grande Jatte, 1884 (Institute of Chicago), which took over 2 years to complete, is his best known work, along with Bathers at Asnieres, 1884. A shy reclusive man, he died in his prime at the age of 31.

The Eiffel Tower, Fine Art Museum
of San Francisco (1889).

Born in Paris, to a wealthy family - his father was a legal official with the government - he first studied drawing with the sculptor Justin Lequien at night school and was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878. After two years, he completed a year of service in the military and then returned to Paris. He moved into his own studio and spent the next two years mastering the technique of black and white drawing.

He studied the science behind the theory of colour and his knowledge of colour perception grew. The technique that he was developing was similar to thousands of pixels on a television screen. These little dabs of paints, laboriously and slowly applied allowed the viewer to optically mix the image themselves. He also used the recently discovered theory of complementary colours, which gave his painting a sort of luminous yet harmonious intensity.

Young Woman Powdering Herself,
Courtauld Institute Galleries,
London (1888).

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 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.

The Circus, Musee d'Orsay Paris (1891).

Other important works include: Saint-Vincent Street, Montmartre, c.1884 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); La Siene a Courbevoie, c.1885 (Private collection); Models, 1886 (Barnes Foundation, Lincoln University); Invitation to the Sideshow, 1887; The Eiffel Tower, c.1889 (Fine Art Museum of San Francisco); Port-en-Bessin, 1888 (The Minneapolis Institute of Arts); Young Woman Powdering Herself, c.1888 (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London).

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.

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Seurat's theory and practice of colour in fine art 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 huge influence on the Expressionist Van Gogh, the colourist Paul Gauguin and the Post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In this sense, he can be considered an important modern figure in the history of art.

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