Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat – The rule of colour as an important key term

Georges Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859. His father, a retired bailiff, had had a prosperous career and had withdrawn to the family summer house in Le Raincy and Georges Seurat thus grew up mainly with his middle-class Parisian mother, Ernestine Faivre. His uncle, the textile merchant and amateur painter Paul Haumonté-Faivre, taught him the basics of painting, and Seurat also took drawing lessons with the sculptor Justin Leqquien, where he met Edmond Aman-Jean, the later master of Fin de siècle and founder of the Salon des Tuileries. From 1878, Seurat studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts with Henri Lehmann, a former pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and during his studies, he stumbled across the book Grammaire Arts Dessin by the art theorist Charles Blanc in which he discovered the theory that colour is also subject to certain laws. This thought would play a significant role in Georges Seurat’s further artistic development.

Friendship with Paul Signac; development of Pointillism

Following his visit to an Impressionist exhibition in which works by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro were to be seen, Georges Seurat decided to leave the École des Beaux-Arts prematurely. The outdated academic teaching seemed no longer relevant for his personal development, and he was proved right. Whilst still on military service, he pursued further theoretical preparatory work, read David Sutter’s Phenomena of Vision and worked on the colour theories of Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Nicholas Rood. He studied the experiments of Eugène Delacroix and thus went on to become one of the greatest experts on optical properties. His first large painting, Un baignade, Asnières (The Bathers, Asnières) was rejected by the Paris Salon and so from then on, he exhibited at the Societé des Artistes Indépendants. In doing so, he found a kindred spirit in Paul Signac, which whom he formed not only a close friendship, but also a new painting style, that of Pointillism.

The search for absolute harmony in art

Georges Seurat never found a great audience or many admirers within his lifetime. In comparison to other famous artists, his complete oeuvre was somewhat modest – but had the greatest of value for art history. Together with Charles Angrand, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce and his friend Signac, he drove New Impressionism and exercised significant influence with his theories on subsequent avant-garde artists. Seurat never gave up experimenting and was continually searching for an absolute harmony in art that would withstand the test of history and defy mortality. Seurat never married, but had a son – Pierre Georges - with his partner Madeleine Knobloch.

Georges Seurat died of diphtheria on 29th March 1891 in his birthplace and hometown of Paris.