artist details

Georges Seurat (1859 - 1891)

French Pointillist Painter

Georges-Pierre Seurat (December 2, 1859 – March 29, 1891) was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism.

His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the icons of 19th century painting.

Seurat was born to a well-off family in Paris. His father was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother was Parisian. Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest military academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own.

For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting — a huge canvas titled Bathing at Asnières (see Asnières-sur-Seine).

After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments, instead allying himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac.

Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which took him two years to complete.

Later he moved from the Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter studio nearby, where he lived secretly with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch. In February 1890 she gave birth to his son. It was not until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his parents. Shortly after his death, Madeleine gave birth to his second son, whose name is unknown.

Georges Seurat died at the young age of thirty-one, cutting his career as an artist (1882-1891) to under a decade. In his artwork, Seurat sought to return to the permanence and reflective nature of classical art that had been abandoned for the spontaneity of Impressionism.

This goal was reflected in his painting methodology: Seurat would spend months planning a single canvas, drawing and redrawing studies and sketches. Due to his slow, meticulous method of painting, Seurat painted less than ten major works in his career. Nevertheless, his work and his divergence from the Impressionist view of art were influential in the development of Neo-Impressionism and subsequent art movements.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the icons of 19th century painting.

Later he moved from the Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter studio nearby, where he lived secretly with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch. In February 1890 she gave birth to his son. It was not until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his parents. Shortly after his death, Madeleine gave birth to his second son, whose name is unknown.
Seurat died of diphtheria on the 29th of March, 1891, and was buried in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.
During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Eugène Chevreul, Nicholas Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They were able to translate the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was understandable by non-scientists. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues.

Chevreul was a French chemist who restored old tapestries. During his restorations of tapestries he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly was to take into account the influence of the colors around the missing wool; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another color when seen from a distance. The discovery of this phenomenon became the basis for the Pointillist technique of the Neoimpressionist painters.

Primary colours: Yellow, Blue, Red, Secondary colours: Orange, Green, Violet, Intermediary colours: Red-Orange, Yellow-Orange, etc.

Chevreul also realized that the 'halo' that one sees after looking at a color is actually the opposing, or complementary, color. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a green echo/halo of the original object. This complementary color (i.e. green for red) is due to retinal persistence. Neoimpressionist painters interested in the interplay of colors made extensive use of complementary colors in their paintings.