Georges Seurat
The inventor of Pointillism.
Seurat built up pictures from small dots of pure colour according to the colour science of his day. He died at 31 but influenced a whole generation.
Georges Seurat was born in 1859 in Paris into a well-to-do family. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1878 and received a classical training with a great deal of drawing after antique models. At the same time he read the scientific writings of the day on colour and vision, including those of the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul.
His first large painting, Bathers at Asnières of 1884, was rejected by the official Salon. Seurat then helped found the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition without a jury. The picture is now in the National Gallery in London. Even as a student he spent much time drawing, and he liked to visit the Louvre to study the compositions of the old masters. After a period of military service in 1879–1880 he began working independently in his studio in Paris.
His principal work is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, on which he worked in 1884–1886. He made dozens of sketches and drawings before painting the large canvas. It was shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and attracted great attention. The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat’s method is called Pointillism or Divisionism. Instead of mixing colours on the palette he placed small dots of pure colour side by side, so that they mix in the viewer’s eye. The aim was a brighter and more scientific kind of painting. The critic Félix Fénéon called the movement Neo-Impressionism. Seurat also made much-admired drawings in black crayon, in which forms emerge from light and dark. He also gave thought to frames and sometimes painted a border of dots directly on the canvas, so that the transition between picture and surroundings would be harmonious.
In his last years he painted subjects from the circus and popular entertainment, such as The Circus, now in the Musée d'Orsay. He lived secretly with the model Madeleine Knobloch, and they had a son in 1890. Seurat died suddenly in 1891, only 31 years old. The cause of death has never been fully established. His ideas were carried on by Paul Signac and influenced both the Fauves and early abstract art.