1. GEORGES
SEURAT
THE LIFE OF GEORGES SEURAT
Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris, France. His
father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, was a legal official and a
native of Champagne; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was
Parisian.
Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien,
a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878
and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy,
he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on
the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to
a studio of his own. For the next two years he worked at
mastering the art of black-and-white drawing. He spent 1883
on his first major painting and a huge canvas titled Bathers at
Asnières.
MEETING OTHER ARTISTS

2. As his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat
turned away from such establishments, instead allying
with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and
other artists (includingMaximilien Luce) formed
the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met
and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared
his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who
subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of
1884, Seurat began work on his masterpiece, “A Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, which took
him two years to complete.4
MARRIED LIFE OF GEORGES SEURAT
Later he moved from the Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter
studio nearby, where he lived secretly with a young
model, Madeleine Knobloch, whom he portrayed in his
painting "Jeune femme se poudrant". In February 1890
she gave birth to their son, who was named Pierre
Georges.
DEATH OF GEORGES SEURAT
Seurat died in Paris on 29 March 1891 at the age of 31.
The cause of Seurat's death is uncertain, and has been
attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious

3. angina, and/or (most probably) diphtheria. His son died
two weeks later from the same disease. His last
ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the
time of his death.
SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCES
During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel
Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote
treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They
adapted the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into
a written form that was understandable by laypeople. Artists
followed new discoveries in perception with great interest.
Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists
at the time; his great contribution was producing a color wheel
of primary and intermediary hues.
Chevreul was a French chemist who restored old tapestries.
During his restorations of tapestries, he noticed that the only
way to restore a section properly was to take into account the
influence of the colors around the missing wool; he could not
produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding
dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly
overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of
another color when seen from a distance. The discovery of
this phenomenon became the basis for the pointillist
technique of the Neoimpressionist painters.

4. Chevreul also realized that the 'halo' that one sees after
looking at a color is the opposing, or complementary, color. For
example: After looking at a red object, one may see a cyan
echo/halo of the original object. This complementary color (as
an example, cyan for red) is due to retinal persistence.
Neoimpressionist painters interested in the interplay of
colors made extensive use of complementary colors in their
paintings. In his works, Chevreul advised artists to think and
paint not just the color of the central object, but to add
colors and make appropriate adjustments to achieve a
harmony among colors. It seems that the harmony Chevreul
wrote about is what Seurat came to call "emotion".
According to Professor Anne Beauchemin from McGill
University, most Neoimpressionist painters probably did not
read Chevreul's books, but instead they read Grammaire des
arts du dessin, written in 1867 by Charles Blanc, who cited
Chevreul's works. Blanc's book was directed at artists and art
connoisseurs. Because of color's emotional significance to him,
he made explicit recommendations that were close to the
theories later adopted by the Neoimpressionists. He said that
color should not be based on the 'judgment of taste', but
rather it should be close to what we experience in reality.
Blanc did not want artists to use equal intensities of color, but
to consciously plan and understand the role of each hue in
creating a whole.
Ogden Rood also studied color and optical effects. Chevreul
based his theories on Newton's thoughts on the mixing of

5. light, but Rood based his writings on the work of Helmholtz.
He analyzed the effects of mixing together and juxtaposing
material pigments. Rood valued as primary colors red, green,
and blue-violet. Like Chevreul, he stated that if two colors are
placed next to each other, from a distance they look like a
third distinctive color. Rood also pointed out that the
juxtaposition of primary hues next to each other would create
a far more intense and pleasing color, when perceived by the
eye and mind, than the corresponding color made simply by
mixing paint. Rood advised that artists be aware of the
difference between additive and subtractive qualities of
color, since material pigments and optical pigments (light) do
not mix together in the same way:
Material pigments: Red + Yellow + Blue = Black
Optical / Light : Red + Green + Blue = White
Seurat was also influenced by Sutter's Phenomena of Vision
(1880), in which he wrote that "the laws of harmony can be
learned as one learns the laws of harmony and music". He
heard lectures in the 1880s by the as mathematician Charles
Henry at the Sorbonne, who discussed the emotional
properties and symbolic meaning of lines and color. Henry's
ideas were quickly adopted by Seurat
Seurat's melding of science and emotion
Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a
scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a
painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art

6. in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and
variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that
the scientific application of color was like any other natural
law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought
that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be
used to create a new language of art based on its own set of
heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines,
color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language
Chromoluminarism.
His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his
feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and
harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of
the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of
line, considered according to their dominance and under the
influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations".
Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion
of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous
hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of
lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an
equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by
the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are
horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors
and by lines pointing
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte

7. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows
members of each of the social classes participating in various
park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored
paint allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather
than having the colors physically blended on the canvas. It
took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m)
painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in
preparation for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is
now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
Seurat made several studies for the large painting including a
smaller version, Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island
of La Grande Jatte (1884–1885), that is in the collection of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City
 THE GALLERY OF SEURAT
The Suburbs, 1882–1883, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes

8. Fishing in the Seine, 1883, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes
The Laborers 1883, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.
Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,, 1884–1885,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bathers at Asnières, 1884, National Gallery, London
View of Fort Samson 1885, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

9. Circus Sideshow (or Parade de Cirque), 1887–88, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City
The Seine and la Grande Jatte - Springtime 1888, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of
Belgium
The Models, 1888, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA
Gray weather, Grande Jatte, 1888, Philadelphia Museum of Art

10. The Eiffel Tower 1889, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco
The Circus, 1891, Musée d'Orsay Paris