1882 (ca.), Georges Seurat, Houses and Garden -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label: Seurat's career began along the typical path followed by most young artists in France during the 19th century. He learned Academic painting from Ingres's pupil Henri Lehmann at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studied the works of early Italian and 17th-century French painters at the Louvre, and exhibited some of his earliest artistic accomplishments at the Salon. Already during this formative period, however, he created drawings using conté crayons that produced a unique scintillating effect. That radiant quality resulted from Seurat's extremely subtle developments of tonal variations, and he continued to explore optical effects of this kind even as his brush began insinuating his awareness of Impressionism. He was ultimately concerned with expressing light in abundance, leading him to adapt the most recent scientific theories of color and light in his painting techniques. This landscape exemplifies an early phase in the painter's patently disciplined application of colors to achieve optical effects and his highly structured approach to composition. The contrast between the horizontal band of the dirt road in the foreground and the vertical lines that define the edges of the building's walls emphasize the discrete tonal regions that Seurat defined with small, crosshatched brushstrokes. He designed a dynamic parallel between the angled rooftop and the diverging slants in the road to add nuance to the static horizontal and vertical contrasts. Seurat's approach ultimately contrasted with the spontaneity Impressionist painting and prefigured an ever-widening gulf between his generation of artists and the previous one.
1882 (ca.), Georges Seurat, Houses and Garden -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label: Seurat's career began along the typical path followed by most young artists in France during the 19th century. He learned Academic painting from Ingres's pupil Henri Lehmann at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studied the works of early Italian and 17th-century French painters at the Louvre, and exhibited some of his earliest artistic accomplishments at the Salon. Already during this formative period, however, he created drawings using conté crayons that produced a unique scintillating effect. That radiant quality resulted from Seurat's extremely subtle developments of tonal variations, and he continued to explore optical effects of this kind even as his brush began insinuating his awareness of Impressionism. He was ultimately concerned with expressing light in abundance, leading him to adapt the most recent scientific theories of color and light in his painting techniques. This landscape exemplifies an early phase in the painter's patently disciplined application of colors to achieve optical effects and his highly structured approach to composition. The contrast between the horizontal band of the dirt road in the foreground and the vertical lines that define the edges of the building's walls emphasize the discrete tonal regions that Seurat defined with small, crosshatched brushstrokes. He designed a dynamic parallel between the angled rooftop and the diverging slants in the road to add nuance to the static horizontal and vertical contrasts. Seurat's approach ultimately contrasted with the spontaneity Impressionist painting and prefigured an ever-widening gulf between his generation of artists and the previous one.