At the end of the last century Paris was a very exciting place to be, particularly for an artist. Young new artists were breaking the traditional “rules,” creating a whole new world of art; younger artists would come along and turn things upside down again. Up until this point art in France had become rigid, fake, and artificial. The artists had specific “rules” to follow. Soon, though, photography began to replace their idealized, yet realistic portrait paintings. Around this same time, a group of young French artists began painting the world around them, capturing their first impression of what they were painting. Georges Seurat was 14 when those Impressionists first showed their work in public. Three years later he entered E’cole des Beaux-Arts and later admitted to the E’cole proper, in the studio of Henri Lehmann. In 1879 he took a leave from his studies to serve a year in the French military. On his return he moved into 19, Rue de Chabrol, not far from where his mother lived. He began to experiment with painting styles in his studio and had his first exhibit at the Salon in 1883. This included the earliest oils, panels, and drawings for Bathing at Asnie’res, also known as The Bathers, along with drawings of his mother, and of his friend Arman-Jean. The next year the Salon rejected his finished version of Bathing at Asnie’res. In May of that year Seurat along with many other progressive artists founded the Association des Artistes Inde’pendants and in June exhibited The Bathers along with works by Redon, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Paul Signac. In this painting, Seurat divided his tones as the Impressionists had done, placing contrasting dabs of pure bright colors side by side on the canvas using broad brush strokes. This technique didn't satisfy him, though, “I want to get through to something new -- a kind of painting that is my own.” However, his dots are much smaller, denser, and more symmetrically distributed and build up concentrated clusters in assertive texture than those of the Impressionists. He wanted an orderly, scientific system of color that would at the same time seem more real than the real scene. So in the grass areas in Bathing at Asnie’res, Seurat began to develop the new technique for which he became famous, pointillism. He devoted the rest of his life to developing this style. Seen up close, the grass is tiny yellow and blue dots, but when you stand back, it becomes a green field. When dots of green’s compliment color (red) are added, the effect should make the field of grass seem to shimmer and almost seem to be alive. Each figure is dignified with a sculpted roundness, while softening contours so that they merge hazily with the atmosphere. All of the poses carefully balance against each other in the carefully thought-out architectural organization. Along with carefully controlling the space and volume, Seurat also calculated the character of the scene. The Bathers is considered one of the great land marks of modern art.

No sooner than Goerges Seurat had become well known for his first large painting, The Bathers, than he closed himself up in his studio with an even larger canvas. He rarely went out, and only then to do sketches and studies for “The Painting.” The final painting measured 7x10 feet and was preceded by some twenty drawings and two hundred oil sketches. He felt that the Impressionists, in trying to capture the effects of light, had lost any sense of structure and composition. He was sure to make an entire composition of tiny brushstrokes of pure, bright color. He mainly liked to draw from studio models for the people composed in his painting. He used fashion ads from newspapers and magazines for the costumes. The first row of characters are in a profile view and in a band of deep shadow. They are all fairly real looking, but one odd factor is the pet, whose tail is said to be three yards long, that is being walked by very fashionable woman. The next row of people in the sunlight seem a bit stranger, and some almost surreal. The multiple perspectives Seurat used here heighten this feeling. The last row, the people on the river, is the strangest of all. The direction the wind blows the boats on the right is different from that of the boats on the left. Throughout the painting, the artificial and natural compete, as they had begun to do in so many significant works of the symbolist period, whether in art or literature. Seurat developed an exact formula, using so many dots of a certain color top the square inch. He knew exactly what he was doing in advance so he could work all day and into the night.

At the end of two years Seurat finished his painting that went on to be known as Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. He was just in time for the Impressionist exhibition of 1886. He refused using a traditional frame, though; so instead he painted a border around it in complimenting colors. Many raved Seurat when they saw the painting, but not everyone was pleased to see themselves at their favorite resort portrayed as frozen figures composed out of tiny dots.

After La Grande Jette, Seurat painted a number of works that again brilliantly caught the essential character and movement of some aspect of contemporary life. He began to flatten his compositions, making them more poster-like.

Seurat died at the age of thirty-one on March 29, 1891, due to a severe sickness from an infected throat. He left behind only six major paintings, a number of marines, innumerable informal oil studies, and a sizable body of exquisite drawings along with a son, Pierre-Goerges through his mistress, Madeleine Knoblock. What he brought to painting, above all, was a renewed interest in pictorial structure and design, the major formal considerations that Impressionism ignored.

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