Lot 32 Dα

The study “Dans la rue” displays a captivating use of colour and is one of Georges Seurat’s few pure cityscapes. This subject, which was so popular among the impressionists, made the elegant bourgeoisie in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s modernised Paris, the sole motif of the picture. From a slightly elevated vantage point – perhaps from his studio in the bustling Boulevard de Clichy – Seurat has fixed his gaze on the flâneurs strolling along the street. In a manner comparable to the famous urban image “Paris Street; Rainy Day” (1877) by the French painter of the city Gustave Caillebotte, Seurat has also composed two distinct pictorial spaces. To the left there is a broad pavement with six passers-by, some of whom are seen in boldly cropped views, and to the right we see the ground floor of a shop with a large display window. A man in a long coat and hat casually stands in the shadow of a long awning. For the figures, Seurat made use of the numerous pencil sketches he had made of male and female flâneurs between 1882 and 1884, mostly only in the form of silhouettes. In terms of colour, the study ranges along a scale of blue and light-brown tones. Seurat has expertly indicated a shirt sleeve with four brush strokes of pure opaque white.
Georges Seurat is considered the actual inventor of the pointillist painting technique, in which pure colours are applied in usually tiny dots and become mixed only at a distance and in the eye of the viewer. In small-format oil studies like this, also known as “croquetons”, this technique was not yet fully developed. Instead, these studies served him as a way to experiment with the application of paint through minute brushwork and to prepare for works as ambitious as “Un dimanche après-midi à la Grande Jatte”, from 1884–1886.