Georges Seurat

Born: Paris, 2 December 1859

Died: Paris, 29 March 1891

Nationality: French


Works by this Artist

Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884
Georges Seurat, 1884-86

Background

Urban, middle class

Studies

With Ingres's pupil Henri Lehmann at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1878-79

Self-study at Louvre

Career

1879 - military service

1880 - returned to Paris

1883 - exhibits at Paris Salon (portrait drawing of painter Edmond Aman-Jean, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

1884 - exhibits at Cercle des Arts Libéraux; exhibits Bathers at Asnières at Salon

1887 - exhibits with Les XX in Brussels (also 1889 and 1891)

1891 - Circus exhibited posthumously at Salon des Indépendents

Important Artworks

Bathers at Asnières, 1884 Salon (National Gallery, London)

Circus Sideshow, 1887-88 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1888-89 (Courtauld Institute, London)

Le Chahut, 1889-90 (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo)

Web Resources

Metmuseum: Seurat

smarthistory: Seurat, Grande Jatte

Readings

Broude, Norma. Seurat in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall , 1978

Clayson, S. Hollis. “The Family and the Father: The Grande Jatte and its Absences,” in Janis Tomlinson, ed., Readings in Nineteenth-Century Art. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996, pp. 212-29

Herbert, Robert. Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004

House, John. “Reading the Grande Jatte,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1989): 114-31

Nochlin, Linda. “Seurat’s Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1989): 132-53

Roslak, Robyn. Neo-impressionism and Anarchism in fin-de-siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007

Seurat, Georges. Georges Seurat, 1859-1891. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991

Smith, Paul. Seurat Re-viewed. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009

Thomson, Richard. Seurat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978

Zimmermann, Michael F. Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1991

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