Georges Seurat

Bayeux – The Artists – Seurat, Georges

This page forms part of a series of pages dedicated to the many artists who worked in Bayeux. A full list of all the artists with a link to their works can be found at the bottom of this page.

Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat

Georges Pierre Seurat (1859 – 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He devised the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism and used conté crayon for drawings on paper with a rough surface.

Seurat’s artistic personality combined qualities that are usually thought of as opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-Impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.

His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally from Champagne, was a former legal official who had become wealthy from speculating in property, and his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was from Paris. Georges had a brother, Emile Augustin, and a sister, Marie-Berthe, both older. His father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife and children once a week at boulevard de Magenta.

Georges Seurat first studied art at the Ecole Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family’s home in the boulevard Magenta, which was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien. In 1878, he moved on to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he was taught by Henri Lehmann, and followed a conventional academic training, drawing from casts of antique sculpture and copying drawings by old masters.

Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cezanne’s work had been greatly influential during the highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of the Cubists from 1911. Seurat in his few years of activity, was able, with his observations on irradiation and the effects of contrast, to create afresh without any guiding tradition, to complete an esthetic system with a new technical method perfectly adapted to its expression.

Click here to read George Seurat’s full bio on Wikipedia.

NOTE: Click on any image below for a bigger version (no new window will open).

NOTE: To our knowledge, Seurat did not work in Bayeux itself, but instead worked in nearby Grandcamp and Port-en-Bessin.

Grandcamp-Maisy

The town of Grandcamp-Maisy (population: 1,630) lies to the North/West of Bayeux along the coast.

1885 - Georges Seurat - Landscape at Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – Landscape at Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - Low Tide at Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – Low Tide at Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - Race in Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – Race in Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - Study for Le-Bec-du-Hoc, Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – Study for Le-Bec-du-Hoc, Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - The anchorage at Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – The anchorage at Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - The away Samson in Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – The away Samson in Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - Le-Bec-du-Hoc, Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – Le-Bec-du-Hoc, Grandcamp
1885 - Georges Seurat - The English Channel at Grandcamp
1885 – Georges Seurat – The English Channel at Grandcamp
???? - Georges Seurat - Three Boats and a Sailor (Study for the Stranding at Grandcamp)
???? – Georges Seurat – Three Boats and a Sailor (Study for the Stranding at Grandcamp)

Port-en-Bessin-Huppain

The town of Port-en-Bessin-Huppain (population: 2,000) lies to the North/West of Bayeux alongside the coast.

1888 - Georges Seurat - Harbour at Port-en-Bessin at High Tide
1888 – Georges Seurat – Harbour at Port-en-Bessin at High Tide
1888 - Georges Seurat - Port-en-Bessin Entrance to the Harbor
1888 – Georges Seurat – Port-en-Bessin Entrance to the Harbor
1888 - Georges Seurat - Port-en-Bessin, The Outer Harbor, Low Tide
1888 – Georges Seurat – Port-en-Bessin, The Outer Harbor, Low Tide
1888 - Georges Seurat - Port-en-Bessin, the Semaphore and Cliffs
1888 – Georges Seurat – Port-en-Bessin, the Semaphore and Cliffs
1888 - Georges Seurat - Sunday at Port-en-Bessin
1888 – Georges Seurat – Sunday at Port-en-Bessin
1888 - Georges Seurat - The Harbour and the Quays at Port-en-Bessin
1888 – Georges Seurat – The Harbour and the Quays at Port-en-Bessin

Seurat painted mostly in the Paris region, but he did work in some parts of France as well. Here are the places he painted in (a link “⇠” to his works will appear when published):

Artists featured on our site who painted in Bayeux (but not limited to) are (a “*” indicates that the artist did not work directly in Bayeux, instead worked in a nearby town):

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