Georges Seurat was a French painter, born in Paris on December 2, 1859. He painted his most famous canvas, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, in tiny dots of pure color, a technique that critics named Pointillism.
The Grande Jatte took him two years and measures more than three meters wide. He died in Paris on March 29, 1891, aged 31, after only three days of illness.
Seurat kept his life as closed as his paintings are orderly. Edgar Degas called him "the notary", a dig at his black suits, expensive top hats and stiff manner, since a French notary is the lawyer who draws up wills and deeds. Not even his family knew that he shared a single room with a young model and their baby son.
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He had grown up with that kind of silence. His father, a well off property owner from Champagne, kept to himself, and the boy was raised in Paris. In 1878 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, the official school where the French state trained its painters.
His teacher there, Henri Lehmann, was a follower of Ingres, the great academic painter of the early nineteenth century, who held that line mattered more than color. So the student began where the school wanted him to begin, with drawing.
His studies stopped in November 1879, when he left for a year of military service at Brest, the naval port at the western tip of Brittany. Back in Paris, he shared a studio with Edmond Aman-Jean, a painter and friend from his student years, and for about two years he did almost nothing but draw in black and white.
He worked in conté crayon, a greasy black chalk, on rough paper. Where he pressed hard, the tone went deep. Where he barely touched the sheet, only the raised grain of the paper caught the chalk, and the hollows stayed white. Faces and bodies emerge from that speckled dark without a single outline.
One of these drawings, a portrait of Aman-Jean, was accepted in 1883 by the Salon, the official yearly exhibition in Paris where a jury chose what the public would see. That same year Seurat started his first large painting.
The painting the Salon refused
Bathers at Asnières is about two meters by three. It shows working men and boys resting on the bank of the Seine, with the factories of a Paris suburb across the water.
In 1884 Seurat submitted it to the Salon. The jury's verdict sent him toward a very different kind of show, one with no jury at all.
What You'll Discover
What Seurat did after the Salon refused him.
How a Sunday crowd was built.
Why he never called it Pointillism.
Who hides in the mirror.
What became of Madeleine.
How a sore throat ended his life.