Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

Georges Seurat

 

Le chahut 1889-1890

(b. Dec. 2, 1859, Paris–d. March 29, 1891, Paris)
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France’s northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

Georges Seurat

The Models 1887-88

(b. Dec. 2, 1859, Paris–d. March 29, 1891, Paris)
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France’s northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

Georges Seurat

The Side Show 1888

Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France’s northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

Happy Birthday Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was born on December 2, 1859, in Paris. In 1875 he attended the municipal school of sculptor Justin Lequien. From March 1878 to November 1879 he was enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After a year of military service on the Breton coast, Seurat returned to Paris. From the late 1870s his interest in current scientific theories about color perception and chromatics grew, and by 1881, he had studied Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839) by Michel-Eugène Chevreul and treatises by Charles Blank, Thomas Couture, Ogden N. Rood, and David Sutter.

A portrait drawing by Seurat was selected for the 1883 Salon. In 1884 after being rejected by the Salon, he, with Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilian Luce, Odilon Redon, and Paul Signac, founded the Salon des Indépendants. With Cross and Signac, Seurat developed Divisionism (the term he preferred to Pointilism), breaking down colors into their constituent hues and applying them side by side on canvas. In Seurat’s method, which he also called peinture optique, colors placed next to each other were intended to mix in the eye of the viewer and approximate the quality of natural light. In 1886 Seurat met mathematician and scientist Charles Henry. Vocal in his ideas about the interconnections between aesthetics and science, Henry influenced Seurat’s desire to logically control color and space and his later attempts to find methodical, scientific means of composition.

In addition to numerous smaller works, Seurat created seven major paintings, the best-known of which is perhaps Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884—86, Art Institute of Chicago) first exhibited in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886. Throughout the late 1880s, he summered on the Channel coast, working outdoors from the landscape and following the example of Impressionism [more] in selecting his subject matter. In the late 1880s he expanded his depictions of bourgeois Parisian life to include scenes of circuses and cabarets.

Shortly after installing the 1891 Salon des Indépendants, Seurat took ill. He died on March 29 in Paris, after a brief bout with pneumonia or meningitis. At his parents’ request, the contents of Seurat’s studio were classified and, after a proposed gift to the Louvre was refused, dispersed among Madeleine Knobloch (his common-law wife) and several of Seurat’s followers.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_145.html