This revelatory study of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) explores the artist’s profound interest in theories of visual perception and analyzes how they influenced his celebrated seascape, urban, and suburban scenes. While Seurat is known for his innovative use of color theory to develop his pointillist technique, this book is the first to underscore the centrality of diverse ideas about vision to his seascapes, figural paintings, and drawings. Michelle Foa highlights the importance of the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work on the physiology of vision directly shaped the artist’s approach. Foa contends that Seurat’s body of work constitutes a far-reaching investigation into various modes of visual engagement with the world and into the different states of mind that visual experiences can produce. Foa’s analysis also brings to light Seurat’s sustained exploration of long-standing and new forms of illusionism in art. Beautifully illustrated with more than 140 paintings and drawings, this book serves as an essential reference on Seurat.

"This collection of the most influential of Herbert's writings on Seurat, long out of print, bear out the praise he has received for "his ability to mix a deep knowledge of paintings and drawings as physical objects with an acute awareness of the way they embody ideas and can be understood as social documents". This book will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of French nineteenth-century art."--BOOK JACKET.

Studie van het werk van de Franse schilder (1859-1891).

A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarship on the artist. Seurat's brief but brilliant career is traced from his early academic drawings of the 1870s to the paintings of popular entertainments and the serene landscapes of his final years.

Georges Seurat died in 1891, aged only 32, and yet in a career that lasted little more than a decade he revolutionized technique in painting, spearheaded a new movement, Neoimpressionism, and bought a degree of scientific rigour to his investigations of colour that would prove profoundly influential well into the 20th century. As a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Seurat read Chevreul's 1839 book on the theory of colour and this, along with his own analysis of Delacroix' paintings and the aesthetic observations of scientist Charles Henry, led him to formulate the concept of Divisionism. This was a method of painting around colour contrasts in which shade and tone are built up through dots of paint (pointillism) that emphasise the complex inter-relation of light and shadow.

A study of the master of pointillism by a highly respected historian of impressionism has been complemented with reproductions of all of the artist's major works, preparatory sketches, and studies.

"... a powerful lesson in what a museum can do when it draws on its own resources." -- The Washington Times "Seen individually or as an ensemble, these compositions represent a culminating phase of Seurat's development, at once lucid, subtle, and strong.... In its clear focus upon an important aspect of Seurat's work, it nevertheless stands as a welcome addition to the literature on that preeminent master of Neo-Impressionism." -- Choice This illuminating introduction to Seurat's unusual art explores the four different views of Gravelines, a small seaport in Normandy, which Seurat painted in 1890, the summer before his death. The book contains reproductions and full documentation of Seurat's Gravelines works and analyzes Seurat's distinctive approach to color, design, and perception.