Georges Seurat valuation
Painted in small, separate touches of colour, and died at thirty-one leaving a handful of large canvases.
Georges Seurat was born in Paris in 1859.
What a work by Georges Seurat is worth
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Bio
Georges Seurat was born in Paris in 1859. He studied at the École Municipale under the sculptor Justin Lequien and then, from 1878, at the École des Beaux-Arts under Henri Lehmann, before a year's military service at Brest. For the next two years he worked almost entirely in black and white, in conté crayon on rough paper, and his first exhibited work, at the Salon of 1883, was a drawing of his friend Aman-Jean. The Salon rejected Bathers at Asnières, which he showed in May 1884 with the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants, and that year he helped found the Société des Artistes Indépendants. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, shown in 1886, set out his method of placing small touches of separate colour to be mixed by the eye. He died in Paris in 1891, aged thirty-one.
He finished only a few large paintings. With the drawings, the small oil sketches on wooden panels and the studies, the work is limited in number and most of it is in museums, so what comes to market is usually a drawing or a panel. The work of his followers can sit close to his, so attribution is examined carefully. The catalogues of Henri Dorra and John Rewald (1959) and César de Hauke (1961) are the references, and a work is expected to appear in them.
Bathers at Asnières, the Grande Jatte and The Circus
Bathers at Asnières is in the National Gallery in London. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and about sixty studies were made for it.
He spent the summer of 1890 at Gravelines on the Channel coast, painting four canvases and eight panels. The Circus, his last large painting, was unfinished when he died and is in the Musée d'Orsay.
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