Georges-Pierre Seurat

Georges-Pierre Seurat (December 2, 1859–March 29, 1891) was the founder and the only great practitioner of the Neoimpressionism. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte has become one of the icons of the 19th-century painting

Seurat studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of military service at Brest military academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He started off sharing a confined studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years, he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing. He spent 1883 on a huge canvas, Bathing at Asnieres, his first major painting.

He later moved away from Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter studio nearby, where secretly he lived with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch. In February 1890, she gave birth to his son. It was not until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his mother. He died at the age of 31 of diphtheria and was interred in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time he died.

During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Eugene Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They were able to translate the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was accessible enough as to be understood by non-scientists. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time. His most important contribution was producing the color wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Chevreul was a French chemist who used to restore old tapestries. During his restorations of tapestries he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly was to take into account the influence of the colors around the missing wool. He would not have the right hue unless he took into account the surrounding dyes. Chevreul had discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another color when viewed at a distance by the eye. This discovery would be the underlying phenomenon that would be exploited by the pointillist technique of the neoimpressionist painters as is discussed later in this article. Chevreul classified the colors into three major categories:

Primary: Yellow, Blue, Red
Secondary: Orange, Green, Violet
Intermediary: Orange-Red, Orange-Yellow etc.