SEURAT, GEORGES

zhôrzh söräˈ, 1859–91, French neoimpressionist painter. He devised the pointillist technique of painting in tiny dots of pure color. His method, called divisionism, was a systematic refinement of the broken color of the impressionists. His major achievements are his Baignade (Tate Gall., London), shown in the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, and his masterpiece, Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte (Art Inst., Chicago), completed two years later. He died of pneumonia at 31. Seurat is recognized as one of the most intellectual artists of his time and was a great influence in restoring harmonious and deliberate design and a thorough understanding of color combination to painting at a time when sketching from nature had become the mode. Other examples of Seurat's work are in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., and in the Louvre.

See catalog (ed. by A. Blunt and R. Fry, 1965); drawings (ed. by R. L. Herbert, 1966); complete paintings, ed. by J. Rewald and H. Dorra (1988); biographies by J. Russell (1985) and P. Courthion (1988).

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