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 One critic wrote of Seurat's paintings such as The Fishing Fleet at Port-en-Bessin that he was "the first to render the feeling which the sea inspires on a calm day." Another was moved by these "really beautiful seascapes, canvases enveloped in a grey dust of light . . ." But Seurat answered: "Certain critics do me the honor of crediting me with poetry. But I paint according to my method, caring for nothing else." -- John Rewald, Seurat, New York, 1946.
Seurat's preparatory research for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, one of the great achievements of European painting, involved thirty oil sketches and some twenty-five drawings in conté crayon. Among the drawings one of the most beautiful is the Museum of Modern Art's Seated Woman. Usually Seurat refined and simplified his studies when translating them to the final composition, but the superb and subtle silhouette of the Seated Woman seems to have satisfied the artist from the first. She reappears almost unaltered in the big canvas (now in the Art Institute of Chicago).
La Grande latte was the last of Seurat's great outof-doors figure compositions. Thereafter his figures appear in the studio or, more commonly, in cabarets and circuses. Perhaps the best known of his theatre drawings is the Museum of Modern Art's crayon study made in the music hall called Le Concert Européen. Again, as in the Seated Woman, Seurat transmuted temporary eccentricities of fashion into forms of classic dignity.
Seurat's method! No painter since Uccello and his "dear perspective" had ever sacrificed so constantly, so passionately to a method -- the little dots of primary colors each an act of calculation sanctioned by the physicists, the lines and tones of the composition systematically related to a scheme of emotional responses.
Seurat's art: the oval patches of grass in the foreground of the Port-en-Bessin announce the counterpoint played between the small, sharply-angled white sails and the gentle ovals of cloud shadows as they move together (diminuendo poco a poco) into the distance until they are resolved by the horizon.
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