Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859. He learned drawing first at a municipal school of sculpture and design, then entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878, where Henri Lehmann trained him on casts of antique sculpture and copies of the old masters.

A year of military service at Brest broke his schooling, and he came back to Paris and spent two years on drawing alone, in black conté on rough paper. Those twin gifts stayed together for good: an extreme and delicate sensibility, and an almost mathematical precision of mind.

Seurat devised the techniques the world now knows as chromoluminarism and pointillism: no blended stroke, but small touches of colour set side by side to mix in the eye. The vast park scene of La Grande Jatte, painted from 1884 to 1886, started Neo-Impressionism and stands among the icons of late nineteenth-century painting.

Bathers at Asnières, finished in 1884 when he was twenty-four, was the first of the two huge machines of his career; the Salon jury rejected it, and its fame came only long after his early death. The Circus, the third of his circus subjects after the Parade and Le Chahut, was still unfinished when he died in March 1891.