Birth Year : 1859
Death Year : 1891
Country : France
Georges Seurat was born in Paris of a comfortably situated middle-class family. He attended school in Paris until he was seventeen and then studied sculpture before being admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for the study of painting. His training was extremely academic and included a great deal of copying of such masters as Ingres at the Louvre, Seurat, however, read widely during his Beaux-Arts days and became interested in scientific theories on the uses and effects of color and light. He began to explore the aspects of light in black and white drawings in 1880, and worked steadily on this theory until 1882. By nature as much a scientist as an artist, Seurat could not accept Monet's instinctive application of visual perception in the use of light. Using as a guide The Law of Contrasts and Similarities, a text on color by the chemist Chevreul, Seurat applied his earlier studies of black and white drawings to the use of color. He developed a specific color wheel based on the fragmentation of light and limited himself to the colors of the spectrum, working out careful compositions that fused design and color. His painting La Grande Jatte (1885), the first of his great Divisionist works, required twenty-three preliminary drawings and thirty-eight painting sessions, a far cry from the canvases the Impressionists completed in one sitting. Divisionism is also called Neo-Impressionism, since it further developed the manner of painting directly from the tube to the canvas. Another term used to describe Seurat's method of painting may be Pointillism, but since Seurat's spots of color may be squares, triangles, circles, dots, or tiny lines, this term is neither particularly accurate nor does it coincide with Seurat's ideas as expressed in his writings. Shortly after concretely formulating his ideas in 1890, Seurat was stricken with a septic sore throat and died in 1891, at the age of thirty-one. He left behind over four hundred drawings, six completed sketchbooks, and about sixty canvases, five of them several meters square in size. He had gathered about him a small group of artists who continued to apply his theories to their works. In addition to his principal follower, Signac, Seurat's Divisionist style was adopted by Pissarro (who eventually abandoned the method as too precise for his temperament), Cross, Angrand, Dubois-Pillet, and the Belgians van de Velde and van Rysselberghe. His theories of construction through solidity of light were also highly important to later artists.
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Georges Seurat
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, A
Georges Seurat
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, A
Georges Seurat
Seine At the Grande-Jatte
Georges Seurat
Circus
Georges Seurat
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, A
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