I imagine that as children we all tried to make a drawing by filling the paper with little coloured dots here and there.
I bet you tried it too, but after a while you got bored and gave up, am I right?
Unlike most of us, Seurat turned this technique into a real art form, approached with scientific rigour and mathematical calculation.
What do you mean? Weren’t they just dots?
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but behind all of Seurat’s works lies a very thorough study of colours and how they sit next to each other.
This artist’s brilliant insight was to realise that colours almost never look pure: to the human eye they are influenced by all the other colours placed beside them. Approaching the matter in a wholly scientific way, Seurat applied to his works the theory of “simultaneous contrast”, formulated by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul.
A big word, but what does it mean?
Quite simply, in his works Seurat laid down precise, closely spaced brushstrokes of pure and complementary colours, so as to “trick” the viewer’s eye. When you stand in front of one of his paintings, you’ll notice that, from a certain distance, you no longer see the dots but make out all the figures of a uniform, glowing composition.
Today this idea seems almost obvious, but a century and a half ago it was a real revolution!
Care to find out a little more?
Right, below I’ll tell you about Seurat’s life and the innovation he brought to painting.
Let’s go!
Seurat’s life
Georges Seurat is considered the master of pointillism and the artist who revolutionised painting with his theories on colour, renewing Impressionism in a scientific key.
I’m sorry to tell you, but there is very little to say about Seurat’s life, because it was truly short.
He was born in Paris on 2 December 1859 into a well-off family. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878, where he attended the lessons of Henri Lehmann (a pupil of Ingres) and began to take an interest in the problems of colour and light. From there began the extraordinary research that led him to found a new artistic movement.
One of his models, Madeleine Knobloch, was also his companion and gave him a son, Pierre-Georges, born in February 1890. Their relationship remained almost secret: many friends only discovered the family’s existence when the artist died.
Seurat died at just 31, on 29 March 1891, from a sudden infection whose exact nature we do not know for certain (diphtheria has been suggested, but also meningitis or pneumonia). A few days later the same illness took little Pierre-Georges too; Madeleine was meanwhile pregnant with a second child, who did not survive birth.
Seurat is the master of pointillism par excellence.
But why paint in “dots”?
What lies behind this choice?
I’ll explain below.
Georges Seurat and pointillism
Georges Seurat’s interest in colours probably grew from reading the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, author of the essay The Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours (1839), but also from the writings of the American scientist Ogden Rood and the critic Charles Blanc.
His research was based on representing “pure” colours, that is unmixed, in all their brightness, while still creating gradations. With the pointillist technique the colours are laid down pure on the canvas, and it is the human eye that does the work of mixing them, creating the nuances.
From a certain distance from the painting, shapes and colours look like blotches; only up close do you realise that the picture is made of thousands of “dots”.
To give a simple example, it is as if they were the tiles of a mosaic or the pixels of a photo enlarged to the maximum.
The result is vibrant, luminous colours, obtained simply by juxtaposing pure hues. To get green, for instance, Seurat did not mix blue and yellow but alternated blue dots with yellow dots: from a distance the eye creates the green on its own, superimposing the two hues. This is a simplistic way of explaining a far more complex technique, one that involves a deep study of colour and light, so-called chromoluminarism.
Seurat’s scientific approach to painting and his study of light led people to call this new movement Neo-Impressionism. Seurat himself, however, preferred to call his technique Divisionism, because the colours were “divided” and the canvas was built up from tiny brushstrokes.
Seurat’s innovation
Georges Seurat was certainly inspired by the Impressionists, but his interest was more scientific in nature. Among his most famous works you will have seen at least once the Bathers at Asnières, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and The Circus, all made with the divisionist technique.
But his works also have a feature that not everyone notices.
If you pay attention to the details, you’ll perceive Seurat’s analytical and even ironic gaze on the society of his time.
From the little monkey the lady of the Grande Jatte keeps on a leash to the woman fishing, from the bathers lying on the grass near the Seine: in every work by Seurat you find a crystallised bourgeois society, where the characters do not interact and stay still, detached.
You’ll find this element in his last work too, though disguised. The canvas remained unfinished at his death and is titled The Circus (1890-91).
This work has great dynamism but, although you would expect cheerfulness in the crowd, if you look at the audience you notice that no one is smiling or really involved.
Many have read the stillness of Seurat’s characters as an artistic rendering of the social immobility of the belle époque: a world that looked calm, pleasant and fun (bathing, lying on the lawn on Sunday), but was already crossed by strong social and political tensions that would erupt, a few decades later, into the First World War.
Georges Seurat, an atypical Impressionist
Although often lumped in with the “Impressionists”, Seurat was a very different figure from his colleagues, both in style and in his way of working.
Many Impressionists painted with pure colours, laying down dense, full brushstrokes, often without any preparatory drawing. Seurat, on the contrary, stood out for the long study he devoted to each work, made up of sketches, studies and drawings.
The Impressionists were famous for their ability to paint outdoors?
Seurat worked mostly in his studio.
These may seem like small details, but they are also why his style was called Neo-Impressionism. Rejected by the official Salon, in 1884 Seurat was among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, whose Salon welcomed the works excluded from official exhibitions; the Grande Jatte, on the other hand, was shown in 1886 at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition.
Seurat once declared:
“Some say they see poetry in my paintings. I see only science in them.”
A line that brings him very close to the geometric obsessions of Escher.
Where to see Seurat’s works
Seurat’s canvases are scattered between Europe and the United States:
- in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay holds The Circus, his last work, and the studies for the Grande Jatte;
- in London, the National Gallery has the Bathers at Asnières;
- in Chicago, the Art Institute keeps A Sunday on La Grande Jatte;
- other works are at the Kröller-Müller (Le Chahut), the Barnes Foundation (Models) and the Metropolitan in New York (Parade de cirque).
If you are in Paris, the best way to see The Circus in person is to book the skip-the-line ticket for the Musée d’Orsay: you skip the long queues and, in the same museum, you find Monet, Van Gogh and Degas.
I do see the poetry in his paintings. Do you?
