Georges Seurat
Georges Pierre Seurat had an unfortunately short career, but his approach and accomplishments in painting have had a long lasting influence. Born in 1859, Seurat worked for the sculptor Justin Lequien while still a student, and studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. His interest in science, as well as art, led him to begin to learn about color theory and the chromatic circle. He began to theorize about a new way to create a painting - to break down each color into its component parts, known as divisionism, and then to separately apply each unit of pigment to the canvas. Rather than combine the colors on a palette, Seurat wanted the viewer's eyes to combine the individual dots of color on the canvas. This approach to the canvas became pointilism. The theory culminated in Seurat's Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884-1886 and now exhibited by the Art Institute of Chicago. Moving away from the Impressionists, Seurat painted this painstaking work entirely in his studio. His other major works include La Parade 1887-1888, La Chahut 1889-1890, and Circus unfinished. Seurat died at the peak of his talent in 1891, only thirty-one years old. However, his Neo-Impressionism and pointilism greatly influenced Gauguin, Pissarro, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, each of whom painted in Seurat's style before finding their own artistic identities.
