Georges Seurat Is Most Famous for His Pointillist Painting of a Paris Park. But More Than Half of His Canvases Were Stunning Seascapes More than two dozen artworks depicting the northern coast of France are now on display at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It’s the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the French artist’s seascapes Christian Thorsberg - Correspondent Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter!
Though Georges Seurat is best known for his paintings depicting parkgoers enjoying waterside repose—Bathers at Asnières (1884) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86)—a majority of the French artist’s canvases are landscapes featuring France’s northern coast and ocean waters.
Now, for the first time, these paintings are the sole focus of a new exhibition, “Seurat and the Sea,” which recently opened at London’s Courtauld Gallery.
“For Seurat’s contemporaries, his avant-garde friends, it was actually his seascapes that were most characteristic and most important,” Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, head of the Courtauld Gallery, tells Country Life’s Carla Passino. “They represented that extraordinary sense of stillness, of quietude, that is so distinctive of Seurat, and they were an absolute cornerstone of his life and of his art.”
Between 1885 and 1890, Seurat left his studio in Paris to spend his summers in the north of France. He traveled with a boîte à pouce—a small box with a miniature easel that rested on the artist’s thumb—and painted wooden panels on the beach. The sand discovered in his tools and paints suggests that Seurat immersed himself in the elements, though he appears to have created his exhibition works indoors.
“We began looking at his oeuvre and realized that his seascapes constituted more than half of his 45 canvases,” Karen Serres, the exhibition’s curator, tells Artlyst’s Nico Kos Earle. “These works were a vital part of his creative process.”
The Neo-Impressionist artist once said that these trips were necessary to “cleanse one’s eyes of the days spent in the studio and translate in the most faithful manner the bright light, in all its nuances,” according to a statement from the gallery.
Quick fact: What is Neo-Impressionism? Georges Seurat was a leader of the 19th-century movement known as Neo-Impressionism, which involved “relying on systematic calculation and scientific theory to achieve predetermined visual effects,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The waters that captured Seurat’s imagination changed yearly. He focused his art and attention on a new port town every summer: Grandcamp, Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin, Le Crotoy and Gravelines. Each one offered new light and patterns to explore.
At every stop, Seurat’s style slowly evolved from Impressionism to a technique known as Pointillism. In some of his earliest works, “Seurat used dashes and crisscross strokes to form main elements before overlaying them with a loose ‘skin’ of large dots,” per Artlyst. Later, he began skipping the base entirely, instead using smaller dots with tighter spacing that helped to better capture a sense of space and wide-open skies. The juxtapositions of color, writes the Guardian’s Adrian Searle, allow his paintings to “retain a naturalistic luminosity.”
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