Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat 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.

While attending school, Seurat began to draw, and, first studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family’s home in the boulevard Magenta, which was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien. In 1878 he moved on to the École des Beaux-Arts where he was taught by Henri Lehmann, and followed a conventional academic training, drawing from casts of antique sculpture and copying drawings by old masters. 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. His formal artistic education came to an end in November 1879.

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. After a year at the Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris where he shared a studio with his friend Aman-Jean, while also renting a small apartment at 16 rue de Chabrol. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing. His first exhibited work, shown at the Salon, of 1883, was a Conté crayon drawing of Aman-Jean. He also studied the works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes on his use of color. 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.

He spent 1883 working on his first major painting – a large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing young men relaxing by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. Although influenced in its use of color and light tone by Impressionism, the painting with its smooth, simplified textures and carefully outlined, rather sculptural figures, shows the continuing impact of his neoclassical training. Bathers at Asnières was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Soon, however, disillusioned by the poor organization of the Indépendants, Seurat and some other artists he had met through the group – including Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Paul Signac – set up a new organization, the Société des Artistes Indépendants, where he showed his Baignade in June. Seurat’s new ideas on pointillism were to have an especially strong influence on Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom.

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 Baignade again, with the Société des Artistes Indépendents, which was to be of immense influence in the development of modern art.

In summer 1884, Seurat began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 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 colour, were Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro. The painting shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the viewer’s eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors physically blended on the canvas. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work. There are about 60 studies for the large painting.

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 Baignade 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 of 1890 on the coast at Gravelines, near Dunkirk, where he painted four canvases including The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe, as well as eight oil panels, and made a few drawings 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 in his parents’ home on Easter Sunday the 29th of March 1891 at the age of 31, and was interred 31 March 1891 at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. On the day following Seurat death 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.

Seurat’s Island of the Grand Jatte (1884) sold for $35.2 million at Sotheby’s in 1999. The 1885 La rade de Grandcamp (Le port de Grandcamp) sold at Christies for $34,062,500 in May 2018.