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Art History

Georges Seurat: biography

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859, child of a petit-bourgeois family. He attended boarding school until the age of sixteen and in 1876 enrolled in the Ruedes Petits-Hôtel municipal art school that was directed by the sculptor Justin Lequien. Here he made the acquaintance of Edmond Adman-Jean. He drew “en plein air” with his uncle, Paul Haumontré-Faivre, an amateur painter. In 1878 he and Aman-Jean were admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study under Henry Lehmann. Seurat frequented the Louvre and read scientific treatises on color, specifically Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839) by Chevreul. He met Ernest Laurent. The following year, with his friends Laurent and Aman-Jean he saw the fourth Impressionist exhibition and decided to leave the Ecole and open a studio in Rue de l’Arbalète. Upon his return to Paris after his military service (1880) he rented a studio and became interested in the paintings of Delacroix, Puvis de Chavannes and the Barbizon School. During the first meeting of the group of the “Indépendants” he met Signac. He spent the summer of 1885 at Grandchamp, a port town in Normandy where he painted his first seascapes. There he experimented with and perfected the brush technique known as pointillism. Between 1886 and 1888 he participated in several exhibitions, displaying paintings such as Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, The Models and The Parade. His friendship with Signac and Pissarro took a turn for the worse following an argument prompted by an article written by Arsène-Alexandre. Pissarro left the group, dissatisfied with the excessive rigor of Neo-Impressionism. In 1889 Seurat met Madeleine Knoblock who became his mistress and born him a son, Pierre-Georges. During a brief stay at Crotoy he began experimenting with painted frames. At the 1890 Salon des Indépendants he exhibited eleven paintings including A Young Woman Holding a Powder-puff and Le Chahut. At the following year’s exhibition that he helped organize, Seurat exhibited five paintings, including Le Cirque. He came down with diphtheria and died on 29 March 1891.

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