Georges Seurat Prints

About Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was born in Paris in December 1859 and entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 under Henri Lehmann, a pupil of Ingres, which gave him a classical discipline of drawing he never abandoned. He studied the colour science of Michel Eugène Chevreul and others and developed the method he called chromoluminarism, and others called pointillism: small, separate dots of pure colour meant to fuse in the viewer's eye. His first large canvas, Bathers at Asnières of 1884, was refused by the Salon and shown that May with the newly founded Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which he was a founder. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884 and 1886 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago, is more than three metres wide and took two years of studies on the island itself; it was the centrepiece of the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Later canvases took on the circus, the café-concert and the harbour at Gravelines. Seurat died suddenly in March 1891, aged thirty-one, leaving The Circus unfinished. His pictures are built on a strict geometry of verticals and horizontals, and that structure holds the dotted surface together at any distance: on a wall the shimmer settles into figures, shade and sunlight.