John Rewald on Georges Seurat

“Seurat... had been for several years... a pupil of Ingres' disciple Lehmann, who had infused him with a pious devotion to his master. Yet... Seurat had also carefully analyzed the paintings of Delacroix, had read with avidity the... Goncourt brothers and had studied scientific treatises on color harmonies by Chevreul... This had led him to conceive the idea of reconciling art and science, an idea inseparable from the general trend of the time to replace intuition by knowledge and... research... Seurat limited his palette to Chevreul's circle of four fundamental colors and their intermediate tones: blue, blue-violet, violet, violet-red, red, red-orange, orange, orange-yellow, yellow, yellow-green, green, green-blue and blue again. These he mixed with white, but to assure... luminosity, color and harmony, he did not mix the colors among themselves. Instead, he chose to employ tiny dots of pure color, set next to each other, and to permit the mixture to be accomplished optically... in the eye of the onlooker, placed at a proper distance. This method he called divisionism.”

“While the small oil sketches Seurat painted out-of-doors in preparation for his compositions often show an impressionist technique, his large canvasses were done in the studio. ...[H]e avoided the sensuous charms which had fascinated the impressionists and sacrificed instantaneous sensations to an almost rigid stylization.”

“Standing on his ladder, he patiently covered his canvas with those tiny multicolored strokes, which give it, from a distance, that intense life and luminosity which are the secrets of his style. At his task, Seurat always concentrated on a single section of the canvas, having previously determined each stroke and color to be applied. Thus he was able to paint steadily without having to step back from the canvas in order to judge the effect obtained.. .Nothing was left to change, to some happily inspired brush stroke.”