The Technique of Seurat: A Reappraisal

Abstract

The standard studies of Seurat's technique have tended to treat it as a straightforward exemplification of a body of color theory current in his day, and have glossed over several anomalies in the interpretation of that theory, both by the artist and by his critics. This essay proposes to re-open the question of Seurat's attitude towards his theoretical sources, and examines the way in which his practice in the major paintings of the mid-1880s can be related to them. It concludes that Seurat's debt to Chevreul was farther reaching than his debt to any more recent theorist, and this must have an effect on our reading of his technique as “scientific.

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Notes on contributors

John Gage

John Gage edited the Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner (1980) and Goethe on Art (1980), was responsible for the exhibition catalogue, G.F. Watts: A Nineteenth-Century Phenomenon (1974), and, among other essays on the history of color, wrote Color in Turner; Poetry and Truth (1969). [Department of History of Art, 1 Scroope Terrace, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PX, England]