Georges SEURAT (1859 - 1891)

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on December 2, 1859, in Paris, into a bourgeois family. In 1877, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. His studies were interrupted by his military service, which he completed in Brest, where he made numerous sketches of boats, beaches, and the sea. In 1882, Georges Seurat dedicated himself to mastering black and white and began painting seriously. In 1884, he completed **Bathers at Asnières**, the first of seven large paintings he would create during his short life. He participated in founding the **Société des Artistes Indépendants**, which had no jury or awards, and he became a leading figure in **Neo-Impressionism**, alongside artists like Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.

Seurat initially drew inspiration from Millet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and he was deeply influenced by Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Puvis de Chavannes, and finally Ingres, whose student Seurat’s teacher, Henri Lehmann, had been. In the summer of 1890, the artist stayed in **Gravelines**, where he completed four seascapes, along with several drawings and “croquetons”—small painted wood panels, as he called them. Upon his return to Paris, he started work on his painting **The Circus**, which he exhibited unfinished at the eighth **Salon des Indépendants**.

He died suddenly during the exhibition at the age of 32 from a malignant fever.

In a few words, Seurat represented a new generation of painters that heralded the breakdown of the Impressionist ideal and the rise of new concepts. A free spirit, a solitary artist, and a cerebral painter, Seurat left a profound mark on the history of art despite his very brief career. Initially standing apart from the Impressionist movement, he eventually put its achievements into perspective, particularly by questioning the role of brushstrokes and colour. These new artistic concepts made Seurat the inventor of **Pointillism** or **Divisionism**, where strokes of pure colour merge in the viewer’s eye. The artwork becomes a whole—a harmony between the painter’s gesture, the canvas surface, the chosen colour, and the viewer’s eye, which, in response to light stimuli, reconstructs the image created by the artist.

As a draughtsman, Seurat quickly learned to isolate small fragments of daily life and simplify them. In Seurat’s drawings, the line plays a secondary role, with the white of the paper providing light to the subject, piercing between strokes of pencil, between shadows stretched across the paper. **Our Young Girl Sewing** is almost a “classic” Seurat figure, as he had early on adopted the repetition of identical formal elements in his work. Indeed, by the time of this drawing, Seurat had already produced dozens of drawings of men and women from the streets of Paris, the suburbs, or the countryside. The seamstress is thus a figure frequently found in Seurat’s sketchbooks.

Here, the drawing seems to have been executed quickly, with a flick of the wrist: long, grey, tight horizontals form the background on which the figure of the seamstress stands out, between angular lines, darker or lighter strokes, and diagonal hatching. The shapes are rendered with varying degrees of presence, depending on the intensity of the material: the woman’s shoulders, hair, and folds of fabric are emphasised through more insistent shading, denser and thicker parallels, and more nervous contours. Thanks to his perfect command of values, Seurat’s “black and whites” are luminous.

Our **black chalk drawing** is listed in C.M. De Hauke’s catalogue raisonné, *Seurat et son œuvre*, volume II, number 392. It can be compared to another sheet by Seurat, drawn in charcoal on chamois paper, from 1881–1882: **The Seamstress**, a similar motif of a woman bent over her needlework, mentioned in the same book, number 446.

“The drawings of Seurat, like those of Rembrandt or Daumier, contain his entire essence. They compel us to silence, to an almost religious admiration. After that, the charms of colour seem almost secondary. Nothing is more moving than seeing great men stripped bare through their drawings. There, truly, they create everything with nothing; no intermediaries, no accomplices: they are alone. In Seurat, so preoccupied with contrasts—in the optical sense of the word—what contrasts there are!”
– Claude Roger-Marx

**Bibliography**:
– *Seurat*, exhibition catalogue, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 9 April – 12 August 1991, Ed RMN.
– J. REWALD, *Seurat*, Ed. Flammarion, Paris, 1990.
– F. CACHIN, *Seurat – The Dream of Art-Science*, Françoise Cachin, Ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1991.
– C.M. DE HAUKE, *Seurat et son œuvre*, 1961

**Provenance**:
– Emile Seurat, brother of the artist (Paris)
– Anonymous sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 30 November 1942, lot 51, acquired by de Knyff
– Anonymous sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 5 March 1945, lot 32
– Anonymous sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 19 November 1948, lot 41
– Mme Camille Platteel
– Mr and Mrs Jacques Koerfer, Switzerland
– Private Collection, France

**Exhibitions**:
Paris, La Revue Blanche, *Seurat*, March-April 1900
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, *Georges Seurat Retrospective*, December 1908-January 1909, no. 142B
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, *Georges Seurat*, November-December 1926, no. 26B