Works by Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat devised a way of painting in small dots of different colours set side by side, so that the eye does the blending, and he drew in conté crayon on rough paper.

Seurat trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Henri Lehmann, then, after a year in the army, spent two years on drawing in black and white. In the drawing Woman Strolling, from about 1884, there are no outlines: he rubbed conté crayon over textured paper, dark for the figure and light around it, so she is a single shadowed shape with a faint glow at her edges.

His first major painting, the large canvas Bathers at Asnières, shows young men resting on a riverbank in a working-class suburb across from factory chimneys. He made about sixty studies for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, painted from 1884 to 1886. There the touch has become dots and dashes, and the figures hold still in profile or face front: a couple with a monkey on a leash, women under parasols, a small girl in white. In 1888–89 he gave it a painted border.

He copied passages from the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, read Charles Blanc, and believed a painter could build harmony from colour and line as a musician does with counterpoint. In Seascape (Gravelines) of 1890, sea, dune and sky are bands of blue and yellow dots, and a darker border of navy and green dots runs round the panel. He died in 1891, aged 31, leaving The Circus unfinished. Most works below are paintings of the 1880s, with some drawings; people come up most, then landscapes and the sea.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery.