Georges Seurat

During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They adapted the scientific research of Hermann von Helmholtz and Isaac Newton into a form accessible to laypeople. Artists followed new discoveries in perception with great interest.

The Seine and la Grande Jatte – Springtime 1888, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

"With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910–1911," writes art historian Robert Herbert, "questions of form displaced color in the artists' attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions, his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] was called by André Salmon 'one of the great icons of the new devotion', and both it and the Cirque (Circus), Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, 'almost belong to Synthetic Cubism'."

Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cézanne's work had been greatly influential during the highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of the Cubists from 1911. Seurat in his few years of activity, was able, with his observations on irradiation and the effects of contrast, to create afresh without any guiding tradition, to complete an esthetic system with a new technical method perfectly adapted to its expression.

Seurat died on March 29, 1891, and was laid to rest in the Cimitiere du Pere-Lachaise in Paris, France.

In February of 1890, she gave birth to their son Pierre-George. Seurat was secretive about his private life, a trait he inherited from his father.

He became traumatized at the news of the death of Vincent van Gogh in 1890. Seurat introduced his young family to his parents just days before he was "choked to death" by a throat infection, diagnosed as diphtheria, which also killed his little son two weeks later, and killed his father after another month.

He lived in his art-studio with his young model Madeleine Knobloch, whom he met in 1889. She came from a working class family and was not fully accepted by Seurat's established friends.

Gray weather, Grande Jatte, 1888, Philadelphia Museum of Art

There Seurat exhibited seven of his works in 1887. His collaboration with Signac led to foundation and development of Neo-Impressionism, the artistic movement also known as Pointillism or Divisionism. Seurat himself preferred the term Divisionism. Seurat was a man of modest means and modest lifestyle. He was abstinent from alcohol, or any substances and stayed totally devoted to his art. He was known as a quiet and at times depressed, but robust and generous person. He was always helping his friends and arranging their exhibitions and hanging the paintings.

Models (Les Poseuses), 1886–1888, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

View of Fort Samson 1885, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

At their initial show in 1884, Seurat's 'Bathers at Asnieres' was exhibited along with the works by Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, 'Vincent Van Gogh', and Paul Signac. That was the beginning of Seurat's friendship with Signac, who connected him to the avant-garde group 'Les Vingdt' in Brussels.

During the year of 1883 Seurat was working on his first large painting 'La baignade a Asnieres' (Bathers at Asnieres 1883), which was rejected by the official Salon. However, the painting was exhibited by the Societe des Artistes Independants, which was organized as a second 'Salon des Refuses' (Salon of Refugees).

The Suburbs, 1882–83, Musée d'art moderne de Troyes

Seurat, 1881, Overgrown slope, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art

Georges Seurat produced most of his works during the 1880's, which are regarded as one of the most salient periods of aesthetic change.

Seurat, 1879–80, Landscape at Saint-Ouen, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art

From 1878-1879 Seurat studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His teacher Henri Lehmann was a disciple of the great neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was the student of Jacques-Louis David. That training was formative for his meticulous working procedure, which Seurat developed in his mature works. Having served at Brest Military Academy for one year, he returned to Paris and continued his art studies.

From 1875 he studied drawing under the sculptor Justin Lequien.

During the early 1870s young Seurat was taking private drawing lessons from his uncle, painter Paul Haumonte, who took him on regular art expeditions.

Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch (or Madeleine Knoblock, 1868–1903), an artist's model whom he portrayed in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant. In 1889 she moved in with Seurat in his studio on the seventh floor of 128 bis Boulevard de Clichy.

Georges Seurat, one of the members of 'Salon des Refuses' who learned from classical training and from contemporary art and was rejected by the official Salon, became the founder of Pointilism (Divisionism) in art. He was born Georges-Pierre Seurat on December 2, 1859, in Paris, France. He was the youngest of three children in the family of a wealthy lawyer, Chrysostome-Antoine Seurat. His mother, named Ernestine Faivre, came from a prosperous Parisian family.