Georges Seurat

Jacques & Pierre Puybonnieux, Paris (by descent from the artist)
Wildenstein & Co., New York
Collection of Mr. Paul Mellon (acquired from the above in 1956)
Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon (Christmas gift from the above, December 1956)

Paris, Galerie Wildenstein, Seurat et ses amis: La suite de l'Impressionnisme, 1933-34, cat. no.174
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, French Paintings from The Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, 1941-1966, 1966, cat. no. 243, illustrated

César M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, Paris, 1961, vol II, cat. no. 561, p. 142, illustrated 

The work is in excellent condition. The colors are fresh and the sheet is clean. Mild adhesive stains which do not affect the work can be seen on the extreme bottom edges of the reverse. A slight oil stain to the top third can also be seen on the reverse which is likely original from the artist's production. Also inscribed "De Seurat" in graphite and "148" in red crayon on the reverse.
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Seurat’s drawings won instant praise for their modernity and innovation. Unusually for an artist of his era, drawings played as decisive a role as paintings in Seurat’s oeuvre and, although his artistic career was tragically brief, he is widely acknowledged to have produced some of the most beautiful graphic works of the 19th Century. The present work, which depicts a street worker with a hose, exemplifies the transformative power of this media.

The singularity of Seurat’s drawings lies in part to his use of the medium of conté crayon and textured, hand-made Michalet paper. He was the first to master the combination of these two elements to create an array of dazzling effects ranging from intense black to the most vibrant light. As Meyer Shapiro has argued, the radiance which seems to emanate from Seurat’s drawings lies in the fact that the conté crayon only marked the upper “ridge” of the laid lines of the paper, leaving the white “groove” untouched, so the white paper seems to glow beneath the layer of black crayon. Contrary to the artist’s paintings where the luminous colored dots adhere to the surface of the canvas, here the light emanates from within the drawing itself.