George Seurat Paper

George Seurat George Seurat, born Georges Pierre Seurat was born on December 2, 1859, in Paris, France. His father, Antoine-Chrysostome Seurat, was a customs official who was often away from the home. Seurat and his brother, Emile, and sister, Marie Berthe, were raised primarily by their mother, Ernestine Faivre Seurat, in Paris. Seurat received his earliest art lessons from his uncle. He began his formal art education around 1875, when he began attending a local art school and studying under sculptor Justin Lequien. From 1878 to 1879, Georges Seurat was enrolled at the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he received training under Henri Lehmann, but because of the school’s strict academic methods he left and continued to study on his own. In April 1879, he visited the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition and saw radical new works by Impressionist painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. The Impressionists’ ways of conveying light and atmosphere influenced Seurat’s own thinking about painting. Seurat was also interested in the science behind the art, and he did a good deal of reading on perception, color theory and the psychological power of line and form. He entered his first state sponsored exhibition in 1883, but was rejected the following year so he along with other artists founded the Salon des Independants, a series of unjuried exhibitions. In the mid-1880s, Seurat developed a style of painting that came to be known as pointillism. Rather than blending colors together on his palette, he dabbed tiny strokes or points of pure color onto the canvas. When he placed colors side by side, they would appear to blend when viewed from a distance, producing a shimmering effect through “optical mixing.” Seurat derived many of his theories about painting from his study of contemporary treatises on optics. His scientific bent was also evident in his work habits, which included fixed hours and the meticulous workings of his techniques. Seurat’s first major