Lot Essay
Seurat designed and painted La Grand Jatte between May 1884 and March 1885, and partially reworked the canvas in late 1885 and in 1886. Twenty-seven drawings and thirty paintings record the evolution of its composition. La promeneuse au manchon is one of four studies of standing women in profile which Seurat made in preparation for the final picture. These studies formed the basis for two figures in La Grand Jatte: the woman with a parasol and monkey in the right foreground, and the woman fishing at the river's edge.
Seurat was perhaps the most inventive and radical French draughtsman of the late nineteenth century. He abandoned traditonal beaux-arts drawing practice for a new manner of his own devising. Whereas academic drawing relied on line and relief to create naturalistic, three-dimensional images, Seurat instead emphasized silhouette, purposefully blurring his outlines and flattening his figures. As a result, the figures in his drawings hold a mysterious, enigmatic fascination. His experimentation reached a climax in the studies for La Grande Jatte. Erich Franz has written,
Much is new in Seurat's drawings for La Grande Jatte. They are on the whole lighter in tone, and the figures are even more immaterial and less tangible than before. In general, the halftone values are more even and their textures derive solely from the paper surface.... The darks are soft and nuanced, as if emerging gradually from the paper, and even the darkest passages are permeated by the white of the ground.... Each [figure] is constructed of simple and regular geometric forms that flatten it from the outset and deprive it of all voluminousness. This internal geometry made it possible for Seurat to dissolve contour almost completely while retaining formal definition. (E. Franz and B. Growe, Georges Seurat, Drawings, Boston, 1983, pp. 81-82)
Seurat was perhaps the most inventive and radical French draughtsman of the late nineteenth century. He abandoned traditonal beaux-arts drawing practice for a new manner of his own devising. Whereas academic drawing relied on line and relief to create naturalistic, three-dimensional images, Seurat instead emphasized silhouette, purposefully blurring his outlines and flattening his figures. As a result, the figures in his drawings hold a mysterious, enigmatic fascination. His experimentation reached a climax in the studies for La Grande Jatte. Erich Franz has written,
Much is new in Seurat's drawings for La Grande Jatte. They are on the whole lighter in tone, and the figures are even more immaterial and less tangible than before. In general, the halftone values are more even and their textures derive solely from the paper surface.... The darks are soft and nuanced, as if emerging gradually from the paper, and even the darkest passages are permeated by the white of the ground.... Each [figure] is constructed of simple and regular geometric forms that flatten it from the outset and deprive it of all voluminousness. This internal geometry made it possible for Seurat to dissolve contour almost completely while retaining formal definition. (E. Franz and B. Growe, Georges Seurat, Drawings, Boston, 1983, pp. 81-82)