Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat
the art of vision

Michelle Foa

Yale University Press New Haven and London

This publication is made possible in
part by the Barr Ferree Foundation
Fund for Publications, Department
of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University.

Copyright © 2015 by Michelle Foa.

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Jacket illustrations: (front) Detail of

fig. 56, Georges Seurat, The Seine at
Courbevoie, 1885; (back) Detail of fig.
26, Georges Seurat, Parade de cirque,
1887–88.
Frontispiece: Detail of fig. 62,
Georges Seurat, Poseuses, 1886–88.
 To Jeremy, Ethan,
and the memory of my father
This page intentionally left blank
contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1
1 Seeing in Series 7
2 Figuring Out Vision 63
3 Seductive Sights 113
4 Sight and Touch in Black and White 155
Postscript: The Eiffel Tower as Urban Lighthouse 197

Notes 205
Index 227
Illustration Credits 233
 acknowledgments

I am happy to have the opportunity to thank in writing the people and institutions who
have helped to make this book possible. Since this work originated as my doctoral disser-
tation at Princeton, I would like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Hal Foster,
Rachel DeLue, and most of all Carol Armstrong for their support, insight, and guidance.
Their feedback on the project continued to inform its development long after I left
Princeton, and I’m profoundly grateful to them for it, as well as for their advice over the
years and for the models of intellectual rigor with which they provided me. In particu-
lar, Carol’s continued support for my work has meant a great deal to me, and she has my
enduring thanks for all of her encouragement. I first studied art history as an undergrad-
uate at Brown University, and it was my courses and conversations with Kermit Champa
that made me want to become an art historian. I am grateful to him for that inspiration
and for supporting my interest in continuing my studies in graduate school.
I was fortunate to spend a year teaching in the Department of Art History at Mount
Holyoke College as I was finishing my dissertation, and I thank the faculty there for their
warmth and collegiality. During that time I first met Bob Herbert, and I am indebted to
him for the scholarly and personal generosity that he has shown to me ever since, and for
all of his work on Seurat. Tulane has been a wonderful academic home since then, and I
thank my colleagues in the Art Department for their intellectual stimulation and friend-
ship. Thanks are also due to the Dean’s Office of the School of Liberal Arts, the Newcomb
College Institute, and the Office of the Provost for the grants and fellowships they have
awarded me to pursue my research and publish this book. I am grateful, as well, for the
support that I received from The Barr Ferree Publication Fund of the Art and Archaeology
Department at Princeton. Jim Rubin gave me tremendously valuable feedback on the man-
uscript at various stages, and he has my profound thanks for all of his wisdom and guid-
ance. Gary Hatfield’s generous comments on my work, and my conversations with him,
have been extremely helpful to me, and I am deeply appreciative of his input.
Talks that I have given over the years helped me to develop some of the arguments
put forward here, and I am indebted to the organizers of those events, as well as to some
of the fellow participants and audience members, for giving me the opportunity to pres-
ent on my work and for their thought-provoking questions and comments, including:
 Kathryn Brown, Anthea Callen, Robin Kelsey, Marni Kessler, Ségolène Le Men, Sarah
Linford, Yukio Lippit, David Lubin, Peter Pesic, Todd Porterfield, Chris Poggi, Gwendolyn
DuBois Shaw, Debora Silverman, Tania Woloshyn, and Henri Zerner.
Thanks also go to the staff at the following institutions for facilitating my research
and granting me access to archival materials: The Philadelphia Museum of Art (and Joseph
Rishel in particular), The Barnes Foundation, the Musée d’Orsay, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Bibliothèque de l’Institut national
d’histoire de l’art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Bibliothèque Forney. I am
also grateful to all of the institutions and private collectors that provided me with repro-
ductions for this book, and to my research assistant Aschely Cone for her hard work in
helping me to acquire those images. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to
Katherine Boller at Yale University Press for her support for this project and for guiding it,
and me, so smoothly and conscientiously through the publication process. Thanks are also
owed to Heidi Downey and Amy Canonico at the Press for their work on this book, and to
Deborah Bruce-Hostler for her copyediting of the manuscript.
On a personal note, I thank my mother, stepfather, and sisters for their support, and
especially Jeremy and Ethan, who are so very important to my happiness. Finally, I thank
my father, who showed me the joys of being immersed in books, pursuing one’s curiosi-
ties, and sharing one’s discoveries with others.

ix acknowledgments
 Introduction

Georges Seurat painted The Hospice and Lighthouse of Honeur in the summer of 1886,
one of seven paintings in a series that he produced of Honfleur’s port and surrounding
coastline (see fig. 8). The lighthouse in the middle ground is matched by one in the far
background, visible, but just barely so, from where Seurat was standing. To the right of
the lighthouse in the background is a jetty that stretches out into the water. These same
lighthouses and jetties appear repeatedly in Seurat’s paintings of Honfleur, as the artist
wandered from place to place around the port and produced a series of pictures portray-
ing overlapping parts of the site. Between 1886 and 1890 (the last summer of his life) Seurat
spent part of every summer but one in a different port town along France’s northern
coast, each stay resulting in a series that consisted of somewhere between two and seven
pictures. A few of the particularities vary from port to port and from series to series, but
the underlying logic of these pictorial groupings is the same; each picture in a given series
depicts a part of the larger site that is represented in or referred to by at least one other
painting in that series. These are groups of images that track Seurat’s movements in space
as he shifts from one vantage point to another to study the objects and spaces around him
from a multiplicity of viewpoints, with each view, and each painting, supplementing the
others. Seurat’s seascapes, then, center on extended visual and bodily engagement with
one’s surroundings, and thus fit in well with his long-standing reputation as an artist
interested in visual experience and its pictorial representation.
It is this interest in vision that my book takes as its central focus. Indeed, few artists
of the modern period are as closely associated with the subject of visual perception as
Seurat. Within a few weeks of exhibiting A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884 in the spring
of 1886, Seurat’s work was associated by certain critics, most prominently Félix Fénéon,
with theories of how vision worked. Seurat’s reputation as an artist keenly interested in
vision stayed with him throughout his short career and it lived on, in some form or other,
in many subsequent accounts of his work. And yet there is much that we still don’t under-
stand about the subject. Indeed, it is surprising how little we know about what particular
aspects of sight, besides color vision, interested Seurat, or about how, precisely, this inter-
est in vision is reflected in his work, besides in his pointillist method of paint application.
What did vision mean to Seurat, what model(s) of vision and its representation in pictures
DETAIL OF FIGURE 8 was he working with, and how, specifically, do his pictures manifest these concerns?
 My strategy for answering these questions is, in part, to approach his body of work
as a body of work. Seurat’s œuvre is a diverse one, and when he died he left behind seven
figure-based paintings, about thirty landscape paintings, and over two hundred conté
crayon drawings. A tendency in Seurat scholarship has been to extract one figural painting,
a few landscapes (not even necessarily from the same series), or a number of drawings,
for example, and interpret these small slices of his oeuvre in isolation. This inclination
is understandable, for Seurat’s body of work can seem disparate, even disjointed. There
appears to be little in common between his placid, mostly figureless seascapes of northern
France, his images of urban nighttime entertainments, and his drawings, say, of his mother
and aunt sewing or reading alone at home. Here, I argue that there is in fact a very clear set
of concerns underpinning Seurat’s diverse body of work, and that each part of his œuvre is
best and most fully understood in relation to the other parts.
I propose that the varied images that Seurat produced constitute a sustained investiga-
tion into contrasting kinds of visual engagement with the outside world, and an analysis of
the opposite modes of being that these distinct types of visual experiences elicit in us. Seurat’s
series of seascapes, for example, explore vision as a way of learning about the external world,
and they demonstrate how vision, in conjunction with bodily movement, enables us to
perceive three-dimensionality and navigate our surroundings. Seurat’s practice of painting
objects and sites from related vantage points in his seascape series is a re-creation, I argue, of
the way that we learn to make cognitive sense of our environment, as posited by one of the
most important scientists of the nineteenth century, Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz’s
writings on the physiology of vision provided Seurat with a model for understanding the
sensory and cognitive processes that enable us to comprehend the objects and spaces in the
world around us. For Helmholtz, as well as for the many psychologists, philosophers, and
scientists who were engaged in the study of visual perception in the nineteenth century, an
understanding of vision was intimately tied to an understanding of the nature and limits of
human knowledge more broadly. And so too, I show in this book, it was for Seurat.
Contrasted with this epistemological notion of visual experience, some of Seurat’s
figural paintings and drawings explore a very different definition of vision, in which sight
induces the diminishment of one’s rational faculties and produces a sense of cognitive
disorientation. In pictures of popular entertainments such as the circus, a sideshow, and
a dance hall, Seurat depicts phenomena and experiences that address their audiences
visually in order to confound and enthrall them. Unlike the more active, sensorially and
corporeally engaged mode of being that is demonstrated in his seascapes, Seurat’s pictures
of audiences taking in different kinds of performances foreground a more disengaged type
of vision, depicting spectators passively consuming the spectacle in front of them. To seek
knowledge or pleasure, to produce or to consume, to be oriented or overwhelmed—these
are the different modes of being and states of mind that Seurat’s wide-ranging body of
pictures explores.
Understanding Seurat’s body of work as a meditation on different models of
vision—knowledge-driven versus entertainment-seeking, active versus passive, grounding

2 introduction
 versus disorienting—reveals close connections among parts of Seurat’s œuvre that have
tended to be treated separately. Rather than focus primarily on either the form or the con-
tent of Seurat’s pictures, that is, on his artistic practice, his interest in science and color
theory, and his pointillism, on the one hand, or on the social significance of the subjects of
his figure paintings, on the other, I argue that Seurat’s sustained consideration of different
kinds of visual experience and their representation in pictures underpins both his style and
his choice of subjects. A fundamental part of my interpretive approach is to look closely
and for a long time at both the form and the content of each of Seurat’s paintings, subject-
ing his pictures to a kind of scrutiny that many of them have not yet received but that they
very much reward. Throughout the book, I also insist on the importance of analyzing his
pictures in the context of the larger series or exhibition grouping to which they belong.
Accordingly, I look closely at relationships between and among his pictures that Seurat
created when it came time to put them on view, taking some of my interpretive cues from
the artist’s exhibition choices.
Seurat’s pictures not only demonstrate an abiding interest in the various ways, and
the various ends to which, we engage visually with the world, but they also reveal the
artist’s meditation on questions that are fundamentally pictorial in nature, particularly
regarding the history and conventions of illusionism. Indeed, there is a rich self-reflexivity
to many of Seurat’s key works, manifest, for example, in his representations of pictures
within pictures and in his inclusion of motifs such as mirrors and curtains, all of which
have long been used by some artists to evoke a variety of pictorially self-referential con-
cerns, as I argue Seurat employs them to do. Relatedly, flatness has long been discussed as a
defining feature of later nineteenth-century French painting, and I analyze the remarkable
and innovative ways that Seurat grappled with the issue of pictorial depth in his work.
Indeed, certain central features of his œuvre, such as his practice of painting his frames
and adding painted borders to the edges of his pictures, as well as his particular model of
the seascape series, take on clearer meaning when they are understood as reflections of
his interest in the perception and representation of three-dimensionality. These and other
aspects of his œuvre are part of Seurat’s exploration of the illusionistic possibilities and
limits of pictures, and they demonstrate his interest in devising new ways to re-create the
spatial fullness of the real world in his work.
This book begins with an analysis of Seurat’s seascape series, which were among his
most widely praised pictures but which have received relatively little scholarly attention. My
first chapter is focused on these understudied groups of works and offers the most in-depth
discussion of them to date. My treatment of the seascapes rests on a close examination of
these paintings both individually and as a series, working to uncover the nature of the rela-
tionships between the paintings in each series and the particular serial logic that subtends
these groupings. I describe the ways that Seurat’s seascapes constitute an inquiry into how
vision and bodily movement enable us to make sense of the external world and into the
possibilities and limits of pictorial representation for reconstituting our perception of our
surroundings. In this chapter I explain the relevance of Helmholtz’s theories of perception

3 introduction
 to Seurat’s work, which I elaborate on in subsequent chapters. More specifically, Seurat’s
practice of painting overlapping views of these sites reflects Helmholtz’s theories about how
we learn to comprehend and successfully navigate our environment, issues that are also
evoked by the motifs that dominate these pictures. In all these ways, Seurat’s seascape series
constitute a compelling investigation into how we come to understand the world around us
and into the ways pictures can convey the fullness of that world to their viewers.
The second chapter shifts to Seurat’s figural paintings, focusing closely on A Sunday
on the Grande Jatte—1884 (Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte—1884) and Poseuses, as well as A
Bathing Place, Asnières (Une baignade, Asnières) and related, smaller paintings, analyzing
them in the context of his concerns regarding visual experience and its translation into
pictorial form. I understand the Grande Jatte less in relation to the social activities and sta-
tus of the represented figures, which has been the focus of many previous interpretations,
and more as a critical reflection on the traditions of the tableau and of pictorial illusion-
ism. In this experimental picture, Seurat systematically dissects and also partially rejects
some of the key conventions of ambitious figural painting, such as linear perspective, the
deployment of the language of the body to convey narrative, and the unity, autonomy,
and complete legibility of the composition. In the Grande Jatte, Seurat also makes evident
the particular definition of vision that underpins the paradigm of the tableau, and he puts
forward an alternative model of sight and of painting that foregrounds the corporeal and
physiological determinants of sight. As such, the Grande Jatte is an important exploratory
work in Seurat’s œuvre, rather than being emblematic of the artist’s larger œuvre, which
is how this iconic painting has tended to be treated. Seurat’s next figural painting, Poseuses,
manifests the artist’s commitment to a specifically physiological definition of vision.
Accordingly, I discuss the many ways that the picture’s structure and subject matter artic-
ulate the various contingencies of visual experience, with Seurat analyzing how painting
can acknowledge and address itself to a physiologically defined viewer. Both the Grande
Jatte and Poseuses reflect the artist’s continued interest in how depth is perceived and pic-
torially represented and in devising new ways of conveying the illusion of three-dimen-
sionality in a flat picture. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Seurat’s well-known
but little-understood practice of painting the frames and edges of many of his pictures. I
interpret these painted frames and borders as another manifestation of his concerns about
the nature and limits of pictorial illusionism and his desire to invent new techniques for
conveying the illusion of spatial recession.
The third chapter is devoted to Seurat’s three paintings of popular entertain-
ments—Parade, Chahut, and Circus—and a fourth figural painting that has been somewhat
overlooked by scholars, Young Woman Powdering Herself. I situate these works within the
broader context of Seurat’s interest in the different states of mind that are induced by
various kinds of visual experience. If, in his seascapes and earlier figural works, Seurat
demonstrates an active visual and corporeal engagement with his surroundings neces-
sary for deciphering the outside world, the model of vision and experience on view in his

4 introduction
 images of entertainments is precisely the opposite: passive rather than active, and one in
which spectators have been entranced, seduced, or stupefied. In these later figural works,
vision serves not to inform and orient, but rather to confound one’s rational faculties. Far
from being straightforward condemnations of these entertainments, however, Seurat’s
images acknowledge their seductive appeal, the artist exploring through the paintings’
form and content a more desire- or pleasure-driven mode of looking and being.
Chapter 4 situates Seurat’s work in drawing as complementary to the perceptual,
conceptual, and representational terms of the paintings, in which the relationship between
the sight and touch of the artist, the viewer, and the depicted subjects of the drawings
comes to the fore. And, as with his paintings, so too do many of Seurat’s drawings, both
individually and as part of larger exhibition groupings, define different modes of visually
and cognitively experiencing the world. Thus, across his œuvre, Seurat contrasts a pro-
ductive mode that entails continuous sensory, cognitive, and corporeal engagement, and
a more passive mode in which we derive pleasure from being overwhelmed and unable to
make full cognitive sense of our visual experiences. But if Seurat’s drawings register some
of the same concerns regarding the diversity of visual experiences that one encounters,
they also represent certain countercurrents to aspects of his painted work. In the draw-
ings, the color and opticality of his paintings give way to a darker, more monochromatic,
and more tactile realm of perception and representation. I close this chapter by addressing
the prevalence of the motif of light across Seurat’s body of work, arguing that it serves as
a unifying thread that ties together the distinct parts of his œuvre. It seems that, for the
artist, light had the potential to create either one of the opposing modes of experience that
he investigates in his pictures, informing, guiding, and orienting a viewer, or, conversely,
dazzling, disorientating, and blinding him or her.
My book concludes with a postscript about Seurat’s picture of the Eiffel Tower, one
of the first paintings of the iconic monument. I discuss this work as concluding evidence
of Seurat’s commitment to the representation of different and new modes of visual expe-
rience in the late nineteenth century. The discussion of the Eiffel Tower in the postscript
functions as a complementary bookend to my analysis of Seurat’s many images of light-
houses in the first chapter and identifies the many connections between these two kinds of
structures. Bringing together these seemingly unrelated motifs and these discrete parts of
Seurat’s œuvre is intended to illustrate my broader argument that the meaning of Seurat’s
pictures emerges more clearly or shifts in crucial ways when they are seen in the context
of his larger body of work. Doing so helps to expose the set of concerns that underpins
Seurat’s diverse kinds of images and unites his pictures into a conceptually consistent,
complex œuvre.

5 introduction
 1 Seeing in Series

Last week, when I was at Dieppe . . . I was thinking of him, as I always do when
I’m at the sea.

So wrote the Neo-Impressionist artist Charles Angrand in a letter penned sometime

during the first decade of the twentieth century to fellow Neo-Impressionist Henri-
Edmond Cross. It was to the memory of Georges Seurat, who had died in 1891, that
Angrand claimed his thoughts turned whenever he was by the sea all those years later.
Angrand was not referring to time spent with Seurat (the latter’s extended visits to the
coast were solitary ones), but, presumably, to his colleague’s five series of seascape paint-
ings, the product of five partial summers spent in different port towns along France’s
northern coast. That Angrand still thought of Seurat’s seascapes so many years after his
friend’s death gives us a sense of how highly regarded these pictures were by Seurat’s
contemporaries. Indeed, some of the artist’s most prominent supporters viewed these
works as his foremost artistic achievements. Émile Verhaeren, the Belgian Symbolist poet
and critic who was one of Seurat’s most vocal advocates, opined in an exhibition review
written shortly before the artist’s death that “the triumph of Seurat is his seascapes and
landscapes.” A few months later, Jules Antoine, another prominent figure in the circle of
Neo-Impressionist critics, wrote in his obituary for Seurat that “his canvases . . . include a
large quantity of seascapes and landscapes, which are, in our opinion, the best side of his
talent.”1 And other critics who were unreceptive to Seurat’s figural paintings or to Neo-
Impressionism more broadly would often make exceptions for Seurat’s seascapes, express-
ing (sometimes begrudging) admiration for his work in that genre.2
Despite the positive reception of Seurat’s seascapes by the critics, these works
were not generally given the same level of attention as his figural paintings. Critics, for
the most part, didn’t have a great deal to say, at least not explicitly, about the logic of
his seascape series or about the relationship of these works to his figural paintings and
drawings, although Seurat often exhibited these works together. This relative silence on
the subject of the seascapes continued in later art historical scholarship, and the schol-
DETAIL OF FIGURE 3O arly writings devoted solely to his seascapes can almost be counted on one hand.3 The
 paucity of commentary, both past and present, is likely due to a variety of factors, such
as a long-standing tendency to focus more attention on individual “masterpieces” than
on works whose singularity is subsumed by a larger grouping, and on figural paintings
than landscapes. But there are also specific features of Seurat’s seascapes that make them
somewhat resistant to interpretation. With the exception of Honfleur, Seurat did not
choose popular or touristic sites to depict. Moreover, Seurat’s seascapes have been almost
completely evacuated of human figures that would have provided a narrative entry point
for the viewer. Lastly but importantly, the serial logic of these works, that is, the way that
the individual paintings within a group relate to the others as a group, is initially difficult
to discern, even though Seurat frequently exhibited all of the paintings in a given series
together. In short, these seascapes don’t declare their meaning very audibly, thus render-
ing the viewer somewhat at a loss for words. It is this silence that I aim to fill, and it is the
specific logic of these series that I aim to articulate, in the following account of Seurat’s
seascape painting practice. I will do so via an examination of another underexplored
aspect of Seurat’s work, namely, his interest in visual perception. Although Seurat’s poin-
tillist method of paint application was and is nearly always discussed as a manifestation of
his engagement with theories of color perception, art historians have not generally elab-
orated on the other aspects of vision that interested Seurat, nor on the myriad ways that
Seurat’s interest in vision is manifest in his pictures, besides in his pointillism. Thus, while
an interest in vision has long been acknowledged by his contemporaries as well as by cer-
tain later art historians as central to his work, the precise nature of this interest, and the
ways that it informs Seurat’s body of work, is a significantly under-examined subject.
The fundamental aim of this book is to elaborate the ways in which Seurat’s interest
in visual experience extends well beyond color perception and his pointillist technique
of painting. I will analyze how his diverse body of work constitutes an inquiry into the
distinct ways that one engages visually with one’s surroundings, and into the contrast-
ing modes of being in the world that these different forms of visual experiences elicit in
us. Vision, according to Seurat, situates us in very different kinds of relationships to the
spaces, objects, and events around us. This book thus takes Seurat’s concerns about the
nature and conditions of visual experience and its representation in pictures as the cen-
tral unifying issue that underpins the various parts of his œuvre. And it is to his seascape
series, to the ways in which the individual paintings relate to each other as a series, and
to the way that these groups of works propose a specific model of visual experience that I
now turn. These series are a key part of the artist’s broader investigation into the condi-
tions and limits of visual perception, into how vision enables us to comprehend and navi-
gate the external world, and into the possibilities and limits of pictures for reconstituting
our experience of our surroundings.
During every summer but one from 1885 until his death in the spring of 1891, Seurat
produced a single group of seascape pictures, consisting of somewhere between two and
seven paintings of a different port on France’s northern coast. But Seurat’s interest in the

8 seeing in series
 coast of northern France, specifically its ports, and his repertoire of images of the vessels,
architecture, and navigational mechanisms that define those sites, first took shape years
earlier, before he was a professional artist. In 1879, at the age of nineteen and after having
completed one year of schooling at the École des Beaux-Arts, Seurat left Paris to fulfill
a year of military service. Although this period in Seurat’s life is never discussed at any
length, the artist’s experiences during that time relate directly to the body of seascapes that
he would begin to produce in the mid-1880s. Seurat carried out his year of service in the
Nineteenth Line Infantry Regiment, which since the early 1870s was garrisoned in Brest,
on the northwestern coast of Brittany. Since the seventeenth century, Brest had served as
one of France’s largest and most important naval ports and, as one mid-nineteenth-cen-
tury history of the city put it, “one isn’t able to separate the life of the port and the navy
from the city, because the one is the life, the soul of the other.”4 Immersed in such an envi-
ronment for an extended period of time, Seurat no doubt learned a great deal that year
about the world of ports and maritime navigation.
Seurat kept a sketchbook while in Brest, but it has not survived intact. Most of its
contents, except for individual sheets that have appeared over the past several decades on
the art market, are unknown. Gustave Coquiot, Seurat’s first biographer, apparently saw
this sketchbook and describes its contents in his 1924 book on the artist. From Coquiot we
learn that during his time in Brest, Seurat “developed a liking for the sea and for boats of
all sizes” and that “he would draw in numerous notebooks, taking great care in depicting
boat riggings, docks, smokestacks, anchors, masts, and moorings.” Thus, Seurat’s interest
in the representation of the ports, the sea, and the vessels that moved between one and
the other seems to have had its roots in his year in Brest. Coquiot also writes that Seurat
spent his temporary leaves that year “roaming the length of the Channel,” visiting a variety
of locales along France’s northern coast, many of them ports.5 Indeed, it was during these
travels that Seurat first discovered some of the ports that he would visit again in the mid
and late 1880s and explore in greater depth in his series of seascapes.
One of the sites that Coquiot tells us Seurat became enamored with during his year
of service was Grandcamp, a small village to which he returned in the summer of 1885,
where he produced his first seascape series. Located on the coast of lower Normandy,
Grandcamp was predominantly a fishing village with a small port and very small tourist
population in the summer months. Seurat produced five paintings of different sites along
the shoreline of Grandcamp and the surrounding area (see figs. 1–5). Seurat’s Grandcamp
series is in fact an anomaly within his seascape practice, insofar as the connections among
the paintings are much more tenuous than in his subsequent series. Nevertheless, this first
series has a good deal in common with his later seascapes with respect to the concerns
at work in these images. Although each of the Grandcamp paintings portrays a different
aspect of the town and coastline, one notices that the works share similar compositional
features when looked at as a group. In all five paintings the meeting of sea and sky at the
horizon line plays a central role. Indeed, this is the single unifying element of this series

9 seeing in series
FIGURE 1
Georges Seurat, Boats, 1885. Oil on
canvas, 253/4 × 321/8 in. (65.5 × 81.5
cm). Private collection.
10
of spare works, other than their general locale. Focusing on the horizon line running
from one side of the painting to the other, the tension between the confines of the edges
of the easel painting and the seeming infinity of sea and sky comes to the fore, evoking an
awareness of the limits of what any single canvas can represent. These pictures also bring
to the fore the possibilities and limitations of vision, for the horizon signifies the furthest
reaches but also the boundaries of visual perception, the line beyond which one cannot see.
Once these issues of pictorial and visual finitude come into focus, one becomes more
attuned to the other aspects of the series that address the conditions of visual perception
and its representation. Boats (Bateaux) (fig. 1), for example, is perhaps the sparest of the
Grandcamp paintings, constituted by roughly equal horizontal bands of brown, green,
and light blue representing the land, sea, and sky.6 This simple tripartite composition is
matched by three almost identical boats situated in the foreground, middle ground, and
background of the painting. It is precisely the simplicity of the composition that gives it the
feeling of a demonstration or exercise, in which the three boats make plain the simple truth
that the same object becomes less and less visible as it recedes into the distance, and that the
physical position of the object in space—diagonal, perpendicular, or parallel to the picture
plane and the viewer—determines what we can and cannot see of it. The painting is also
a demonstration of some of the ways that painting is able to convey the illusion of three-
dimensionality, namely, through the use of foreshortening and by scaling objects to give
seeing in series
FIGURE 2
Georges Seurat, The Fort Samson
(Grandcamp), 1885. Oil on canvas,
255/8 × 321/8 in. (65 × 81.5 cm).
Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
11
the impression that they lie at different distances from the viewer. The representation of
what appears to be the same boat in space from three different angles not only conveys the
three-dimensionality of that object in the real world, it also communicates that the funda-
mental challenge of painting is to re-create this solidity and sense of depth on a flat surface.
Seurat’s demonstration of the conditions and limits of visual perception and its rep-
resentation in Boats is further manifested by the boat in the foreground whose mast touches
the top border of the painting. The contact between this boat and the edge of the picture
plane hints at the visual limitations of proximity and is mirrored, at the other extreme, by
the tiny white triangle in the far left of the painting along the horizon, situated too far away
for the viewer to decipher with certainty. That which is too near may be just as difficult to
see as that which is too far away, and there is no ideal position that offers full visual com-
prehension of the observed scene. Rather, each vantage point provides and denies access to
different aspects of one’s surroundings, with each view supplementing the others.
Like Boats, the compositions of the other pictures in the series, such as The Fort
Samson (Grandcamp), The Roadstead at Grandcamp (La rade de Grandcamp), Grandcamp
(Evening) (Grandcamp [soir] ), also highlight the tension between the expanse of land, sea,
and sky and the edges of the painting that fragment and frame these expanses (figs. 2, 3,
and 5). In The Roadstead, Seurat emphasizes the lateral limits of the visual and pictorial
field by focusing on the numerous boats on the water that have just entered or are about
seeing in series
FIGURE 3
Georges Seurat, The Roadstead at
Grandcamp, 1885. Oil on canvas,
255/8 × 317/8 in. (65 × 80 cm). Private
collection.

FIGURE 4
Georges Seurat, The Bec du Hoc
(Grandcamp), 1885. Oil on canvas,
251/2 × 321/8 in. (64.8 × 81.6 cm). Tate
Gallery, London.
FIGURE 5
Georges Seurat, Grandcamp
(Evening), 1885. Oil on canvas, 26 ×
321/2 in. (66.2 × 82.4 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Estate of John Hay Whitney
(285.1983).
13
to drift out of the field of vision and beyond the confines of the picture. The Bec du Hoc
(Grandcamp), which portrays a prominent rock formation that juts out from the coastal
cliffs that surround the town of Grandcamp, is the only work in the series to present the
viewer with a dramatic vista (fig. 4). This particular site offers an especially unencumbered
view of the sea and the surrounding coastline, which is likely why it appealed to Seurat.
But the allure of the vista is undercut by an awareness of the limitations of what any sin-
gle painting can represent of this expansive view. The Grandcamp series as a whole, then,
constitutes Seurat’s preliminary investigations into the limits of vision from any single
vantage point, and the representational limitations of the single easel painting.
Seurat’s next seascape painting campaign, which he undertook in Honfleur in the
summer of 1886, resulted in a more intertwined set of images (see figs. 6–8, 11–14). Honfleur
is a port town located on the western side of the mouth of the Seine; it was the only coastal
town Seurat painted that was a somewhat popular destination for artists and tourists. The
seven Honfleur paintings depict a series of views of the entry to the port, its interior basins,
its lighthouses, its jetties, and the surrounding coastline. As one tries to articulate what
these images are about, to locate where their meaning may lie, one also finds oneself real-
izing what these images are clearly not about. One important exclusion is that of human
figures from all seven paintings, which not only discourages an anecdotal interpretation of
these pictures but also situates Seurat as their protagonist, foregrounding his experiences
seeing in series
FIGURE 6
Georges Seurat, Entrance to the
Port of Honfleur, 1886. Oil on can-
vas, 213/8 × 255/8 in. (54.3 × 65.1 cm).
The Barnes Foundation,
Philadelphia, BF942.
14
of these sites. Relatedly, although the day-to-day comings and goings of the ships—and the
navigation aids and port infrastructure that this maritime traffic relies on—are clearly very
engaging for the artist, the socioeconomic aspects of these phenomena do not seem to be
of much interest to him. Other important absences from most of the Honfleur paintings
are the ephemeral effects of light or weather on the scene, which were so prominently
featured in many Impressionist landscapes. And just as the aim of representing an instant
of perception ostensibly necessitated (at least the appearance of) an abbreviated method of
paint application in Impressionist pictures, conversely, Seurat’s careful, pointillist or semi-
pointillist method of brushwork in the Honfleur paintings conveys that these works are not
about the hasty recording of transient effects.
It is imperative that these works be studied not only individually, but also in the
context of one another, for it is only when they are viewed together that the logic of the
series emerges. Crucially, when the Honfleur paintings are looked at as a group, several
overlaps and repetitions from one picture to another come into view. In Entrance to the
Port of Honeur (Entrée du port d’Honeur) Seurat shows us the two jetties that frame
the entryway of the port, each of which culminates in a small lighthouse (fig. 6). These
small lighthouses, often referred to as harbor lights or feux de port, served to mark the
entrance to a port and to convey information about water levels. On the right of the
seeing in series
FIGURE 7
Georges Seurat, Tip of the Jetty of
Honfleur, 1886. Oil on canvas, 18 ×
217/12 in. (46 × 55 cm). Kröller-
Müller Museum, Otterlo.
15
painting is the eastern jetty of Honfleur, at the end of which stood not only a harbor
light but also a tide signal. A common feature of port entrances, tide signals communi-
cated information about the movement of the tides and the height of the water above
two meters by displaying various combinations of balls and flags hoisted on a cross-
shaped mast. At the far left of the picture, in the middle ground, we see the end of the
western jetty, its harbor light just barely visible from where Seurat was standing at the
tip of what was called the jetée du transit, facing the two longer jetties. The subject of Tip
of the Jetty of Honeur (Bout de la jetée d’Honeur) (fig. 7) is the same western jetty and
harbor light in the far left of Entrance to the Port, now seen from a much closer vantage
point, which was the tip of the seawall that encloses the bassin de retenue.7 This same
small lighthouse and jetty make their appearance in a third Honfleur painting, The
Hospice and Lighthouse of Honeur (L’hospice et le phare d’Honeur) (fig. 8). Here we see the
largest of Honfleur’s three lighthouses (usually referred to as the “lighthouse of the hos-
pice” or the “lighthouse of the hospital”) in the middle ground and, to its left and in the
far distance, the western jetty and its harbor light. In other words, Seurat shows us the
same lighthouse and jetty from afar, from close up, and from the side, three images con-
stituting three overlapping views, produced by the artist taking up a series of different
vantage points in space.
seeing in series
FIGURE 8
Georges Seurat, The Hospice and
Lighthouse of Honfleur, 1886. Oil
on canvas, 261/4 × 321/4 in. (66.7 ×
81.9 cm). National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr.
and Mrs. Paul Mellon (1983.1.33).

FIGURE 9
Photograph of the western jetty of
Honfleur, c. 1900.
FIGURE 10
Georges Seurat, Harbor Light at
Honfleur, 1886. Conté crayon
heightened with gouache on laid
paper, 91/2 × 121/8 in. (24.1 × 30.8
cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. Robert Lehman
Collection, 1975 (1975.1.705).
17
Seurat’s particular interest in the western jetty of Honfleur is not an arbitrary one.
On the contrary, its prominence in this series evokes the multiple views of one’s sur-
roundings that one accumulates by walking from one vantage point to another, precisely
the process Seurat followed to produce this series of pictures. The functional purposes
of jetties were to direct currents, protect the harbor, help maintain water depth, and, in
general, facilitate the movement of vessels in and out of the port. But over the course of
the nineteenth century they began to enjoy great popularity as promenades from which
to take in different vistas of the surrounding sea and coast.8 Late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century photographs of Honfleur (fig. 9) testify to the popularity of promenad-
ing on the jetty, as do contemporary travel guides. One such guide, written by a woman
named Madame de Lalaing, is a five-volume series entitled Les Côtes de la France, pub-
lished between 1886 and 1890. Part travel diary, part guidebook, Lalaing’s work gives a
first-person account of travels with her family along the northern coast of France; in the
sections on her visits to Le Havre and Honfleur, the jetties take pride of place. Just before
leaving Le Havre for the short steamer ride to Honfleur, she and her family “went to say
our goodbyes to our dear jetty.” After arriving in Honfleur, the very first attraction they
visit is the western jetty. “From the tip of this jetty, which is very beautiful and which
stretches far into the sea, one enjoys a magnificent view. Opposite is the mouth of the
Seine, Le Havre, and the lighthouses of La Hève; to the right, the jetty and the lighthouse
of the east; to the left, the lighthouse of the hospital. We remained quite a long time on the
jetty, finding it difficult to tear ourselves away from the charm of the sight.”9 Given that
each of Seurat’s seascape series (with the exception of the Grandcamp group) is structured
seeing in series
FIGURE 11
Georges Seurat, Mouth of the Seine,
Evening, 1886. Oil on canvas, with
painted wood frame, 303/4 × 37 in.
(78.3 × 94 cm) including frame. The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy.
18
around the artist’s accumulation of related views of the site from different vantage points,
his highlighting of the jetty, with its evocation of an ambulatory spectator, is more signifi-
cant than it might initially seem. Likewise, the tide signal and lighthouses that figure so
prominently in Seurat’s paintings of Honfleur as well as in the few drawings he produced
of the site (one of which features a harbor light illuminated at night) all directly bear on
the subject of the spatial navigation of one’s surroundings (fig. 10).
Seurat’s other Honfleur paintings also portray spatially overlapping sites and con-
tain motific repetitions, thereby elaborating on the project of representing the same spaces
and objects from different points of view. Mouth of the Seine, Evening (Embouchure de la
Seine, soir) and The Shore at Bas Butin (La grève du Bas Butin) (figs. 11, 12) both depict scenes
of Honfleur’s coast as it meets the open sea. The two pictures look like mirror images of
each other, each portraying a section of the Honfleur shore marked by series of wooden
posts (most likely breakwaters of some kind), with the land taking up opposite corners. As
such, they seem to represent either identical or closely overlapping parts of the site seen
from inverse perspectives. In a letter that Seurat wrote from Honfleur to Paul Signac, he
grouped these two pictures together, an indication that they might indeed constitute a
related pair.10 The two Honfleur paintings that depict the interior of the port, The Maria,
Honeur (fig. 13) and Corner of a Basin, Honeur (Coin d’un bassin, Honeur) (fig. 14), display
seeing in series
FIGURE 12
Georges Seurat, The Shore at Bas
Butin, 1886. Oil on canvas, 263/8 ×
307/8 in. (67 × 78 cm). Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Tournai.
19
the same kind of mirrored similarity to one another as the Mouth of the Seine and Shore
at Bas Butin pair. That is to say, the two paintings of a ship docked in a basin could easily
be assumed to represent the same ship seen from inverse viewing positions, such that the
dock appears on the right side of The Maria and on the left side of Corner of a Basin. While
some evidence suggests that the latter painting depicts a ship located in a different basin
than the one shown in The Maria (which was the name of a ship that would regularly dock
in the Honfleur port), the similarity between the two paintings nevertheless suggests—and
I would argue that Seurat intended it this way—that these works depict the same ship
painted from opposite perspectives. And, to bring my analysis of the series full circle, the
vantage point taken up by Seurat to paint Entrance to the Port, which was the tip of the jetée
du transit facing the sea, is the exact same one he assumes when painting The Maria, but
now facing the opposite direction, toward the interior basins and with his back to the sea.
Studying the individual paintings within the context of the other works, the viewer comes
to understand how these images constitute a series, and how the series came about, with
the artist walking from site to site within the more general locale, painting overlapping
views from these related but distinct vantage points.
How might we glean the meaning of Seurat’s series strategy? That is, in what
terms should we understand the motivation for and significance of Seurat’s rendering
seeing in series
FIGURE 13
Georges Seurat, The Maria,
Honfleur, 1886. Oil on canvas, 207/8
× 25 in. (53 × 63.5 cm). National
Museum, Prague.
20
of interrelated views of the site, and his foregrounding of his own mobility in relation to
these sights and spaces? For it is these perambulations, I argue, and the collection of views
of the same objects and spaces from different vantage points, as much as the actual coasts
and ports that he depicts, that are the subject of his series. I propose that Seurat’s practice
of producing related views of these sites is a demonstration of how we make sense of the
world around us, as put forward by one of the nineteenth century’s most important sci-
entists of vision, Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a towering figure in the field
of nineteenth-century physiological optics, and it is his writings on visual perception,
especially spatial perception and the discrepancies between our perception of the external
world and our perception of pictures of the world, that I want to draw from in order to
interpret not only Seurat’s series of seascape paintings but also other parts of his œuvre
over the course of this book.
In the existing scholarship on Seurat, Helmholtz is usually only briefly mentioned,
if at all, and the few discussions of the relationship between Helmholtz’s writings and
Seurat’s work are limited to the scientist’s theories of color perception. Almost nowhere
in the secondary literature on Seurat are Helmholtz’s writings on other aspects of visual
and sensory perception, such as spatial perception, discussed, but his work on these
issues, I insist, had a profound and visible impact on Seurat’s pictures. Indeed, Seurat cited
seeing in series
FIGURE 14
Georges Seurat, Corner of a Basin,
Honfleur, 1886. Oil on canvas, 311/4
× 242/3 in. (79.5 × 63 cm). Kröller-
Müller Museum, Otterlo.
21
Helmholtz as one of a handful of figures whose writings influenced his work, and Paul
Signac confirmed Seurat’s interest in Helmholtz in his 1899 book on Neo-Impressionism,
among other places.11 Helmholtz’s landmark Treatise on Physiological Optics, published
in Germany between 1856 and 1867, was translated into French in 1867, and other lec-
tures and essays by Helmholtz were also available in French translation. Furthermore,
Helmholtz’s research on perception was widely accessible in France in Seurat’s time
through the work of French scholars. Hippolyte Taine, one of the most well-known intel-
lectuals in France of the later nineteenth century, cites Helmholtz’s writings on perception
and cognition in his major work on psychology De l’Intelligence, published in 1870 and
seeing in series
 reissued in subsequent editions during the 1870s and 1880s. Among other sections,
Helmholtz’s ideas are discussed at length in the portions of Taine’s book that address the
acquisition of spatial perception, with Helmholtz serving as one of Taine’s main sources.
Likewise, Théodule Ribot, an eminent French psychologist and philosopher of the period,
devoted considerable attention to Helmholtz’s theories of depth perception in his 1879
book La Psychologie allemande contemporaine. Helmholtz’s writings and ideas were also
frequently featured in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, the journal that Ribot
founded in 1876. This is to name just a few of the prominent scientists and intellectu-
als disseminating Helmholtz’s work in France in the last few decades of the nineteenth
century.12
One of the central issues that Helmholtz explored in his research on optics that I
want to focus on here concerned the mechanisms by which sensory perception produces
the impression of space and solidity in the external world. The perceived epistemological
importance of understanding depth perception was made clear by Helmholtz when he
wrote, “the explanation of the Perception of Solidity or Depth in the field of vision has
for many years become the field of much investigation and no little controversy. And no
wonder, for we have already learned enough to see that the questions which have here to
be decided are of fundamental importance, not only for the physiology of sight, but for a
correct understanding of the true nature and limits of human knowledge generally.” In his
Treatise on Physiological Optics, as well as in other writings, Helmholtz analyzed the means
by which we learn to make various kinds of spatial determinations, the most important
being binocular vision and the movements of the eye(s), head, and body. In the case of
binocular vision, the difference between the impressions received by each eye occupying
a slightly different location in space is called “binocular disparity.” This disparity, or the
difference between the impressions of a single moving eye, enables us to cognitively con-
struct a sense of distance and three-dimensionality.13 In the case of the movements of the
body in space, the changes that occur in our visual perception as our physical location
changes in relation to the object of sight, called “motion parallax,” also provide the brain
with cues to calculate distance, spatial location, and solidity. In short, it is by comparing
different views of the same object from different points in space—through stationary
binocular vision, the movement of a single eye, the movements of the eyes and the head,
and especially the movements of the body—that we are able to make spatial sense of
our surroundings.
But how exactly do multiple flat visual impressions of a scene give us a sensation
of its three-dimensionality, given that these retinal impressions are, of course, two-di-
mensional? Or, as Helmholtz put it, how is it that “instead of the two plane retinal images,
we find that the actual impression on our mind is a solid image of three dimensions?”14
Helmholtz posited that our sense of depth is produced not in the eye per se, but rather
in the brain, which associates these multiple flat retinal images with memories of pre-
vious tactile and bodily experiences. That is, the perception of three-dimensionality is

22 seeing in series
 acquired through a process of experimentation, by which we repeatedly move our bodies
and engage haptically with surrounding objects, while simultaneously receiving a series
of visual and ocular-motor sensations. Those sensations become cues or “signs” for the
sensation of three-dimensionality that we experience by means of touch and bodily
movement. Eventually, we begin to unconsciously associate our visual sensations with
the memory of previous corresponding tactile and bodily movements, thereby cognitively
attributing three-dimensionality to the visual world as we perceive it.
As an illustration, Helmholtz describes the way a child learns to correlate visual
sensations with three-dimensionality through continual sensory and corporeal interac-
tion with surrounding objects. “The essential thing in this process,” he writes, “is just this
principle of experimentation. Spontaneously and by our own power, we vary some of
the conditions under which the object has been perceived. . . . In fact we see children also
experimenting with objects in this way. They turn them constantly round and round, and
touch them with the hands and the mouth, doing the same things over and over again
day after day with the same objects, until their forms are impressed upon them; in other
words, until they get the various visual and tactile impressions made by observing and
feeling the same object on various sides.”15 In this way, the child learns how various visual
impressions of the object correlate with his or her tactile and bodily sensations of that
object’s three-dimensionality. Similarly, the movements of our own body in space, and
our corresponding visual impressions of this corporeal movement, enable us to eventually
identify certain visual impressions as cues for spatial extension, distance, relative location
in space, and so on. “Once we know by means of touch what relation in space and what
movement is,” Helmholtz wrote, “we can further learn what changes in the impressions
on the eye correspond to the voluntary movements of a hand which we can see.” As such,
three-dimensionality can never be directly perceived by the eye; it is only through the
acquisition of a set of correspondences between optical impressions and tactile and bodily
experiences that we learn to attribute depth and solidity to the visual world. Crucially,
Helmholtz repeatedly stressed in his writings that this kind of active sensory and bodily
engagement with the external world necessary for comprehending our surroundings is not
limited to infancy or childhood. Throughout our life, we are constantly, if unconsciously,
conducting experiments that test or confirm the laws we have developed to correlate
our sensations to particular conditions in the outside world. As Helmholtz wrote, “the
correspondence, therefore, between the external world and the perceptions of sight rests,
either in whole or in part, upon the same foundation as all our knowledge of the actual
world—on experience, and on constant verication of its accuracy by experiments which we
perform with every movement of our body.”16
In De l’Intelligence, Hippolyte Taine identifies precisely these processes as consti-
tuting the crux of how we learn to perceive depth in our surroundings, and he turns
to Helmholtz to provide the gloss. “I leave further explanation to treatises on optics
and physiology, in which will be found the enumeration and explanation of all optical

23 seeing in series
 judgments and errors,” Taine writes in the conclusion of an extensive discussion of spatial
perception and of the means by which we make cognitive sense of our visual sensations.
He continues: “They are the subject matter of a whole science, but are reduced to one prin-
ciple. ‘By experience,’ says Helmholtz, ‘we can evidently learn what other sensations of the
sight or other senses an object we see will excite in us, if we advance our eyes or body, if
we look at the object from different directions, if we feel it, etc. . . . The perception of the
body [i.e., the object being perceived] includes all the distinct possible group of sensations
which the body when looked at, touched, and experimented on in various ways, can excite
in us.’”17 Such was how Taine, via Helmholtz, summarized the coordination of the senses,
body, and mind necessary for our comprehension of the three-dimensional world.
Before addressing the relevance of Helmholtz’s theories to Seurat’s seascape paint-
ings, it is important to first point out that Helmholtz himself discussed at length the rela-
tionship between our visual perception of the external world and our experiences looking
at pictorial representations of the world. One of the fundamental discrepancies between
the two, according to Helmholtz, is that the most important means by which we perceive
depth in our surroundings, namely binocular vision and the movement of the body in
space, are inoperable as depth-cue providers when we are looking at a picture; a single,
static, two-dimensional representation of a scene or object can never offer us the multiple,
distinct views of the same scene that binocular vision and movement in space produce.
“Apart from the fact that any movement of the observer, whereby his eyes change position,
will produce displacements of the visual image, different when he stands before objects
from those when he stands before the image, I could speak of only one eye for which
equality of impression [between looking at the external world and looking at a painting]
is to be established. We, however, see the world with two eyes, which occupy somewhat
different positions in space, and which therefore show us two different perspective views
of objects before us.”18 In other words, when looking at a picture, both the left and the
right eye perceive the same image, rather than the two slightly different views of the real
scene perceived in binocular vision. Consequently, a painted scene cannot provide us with
the binocular disparity that normally sustains the perception of depth and solidity. Indeed,
this lack of binocular disparity tells us that a painting is flat. Likewise, the various visual
cues for distance and relations in space that we perceive through changes in our physical
position are also not available when looking at a painting. A painted representation of a
scene remains unchanging, regardless of the different vantage points we might take up. To
illustrate the latter point, Helmholtz offers the following example:

Suppose, for instance, that a person is standing still in a thick woods, where it is
impossible for him to distinguish, except vaguely and roughly, in the mass of foli-
age and branches all around him what belongs to what tree and what to another, or
how far apart the separate trees are, etc. But the moment he begins to move forward,
everything disentangles itself, and immediately he gets an apperception of the material

24 seeing in series
 contents of the woods and their relations to each other in space. The direct impres-
sion on the sense of vision produced by these apparent relative motions of the various
trunks, branches and leaves of the trees of the actual woods will necessarily be entirely
different from that which could be obtained from a painting of this forest, no matter
how perfect it is. In going past a flat canvas with a picture on it, the apparent positions
of all parts of it with respect to each other remain the same all over the field of view.
A part of the painting which represents more remote objects moves with respect to
the observer exactly in the same way as an adjacent part on which a nearer object is
portrayed. All that a painting can ever do is to represent the view of a scene as it looks
from some single fixed point of view.

Looking at a painting of a scene is thus akin to looking at the actual scene with a station-
ary, monocular gaze, rather than with a binocular gaze and a mobile head and body. The
only exception that Helmholtz repeatedly cited when discussing the differences between
looking at a scene in the world and looking at a flat picture were stereoscopic images.
Here the viewer looks simultaneously at two pictures that reproduce the slight disparity
between the two views of a scene perceived in binocular vision, resulting in a powerful
illusion of three-dimensionality.19
I want to posit Seurat’s seascapes as an extended reconstitution and illustration of
the process by which we visually and corporeally engage with the external world in order
to make cognitive sense of it. More specifically, Seurat’s practice of walking around these
sites and depicting the same or contiguous parts of the site from different positions in
space makes manifest the contingency of cognition on our movement through space and
on our accumulation of different views of the same objects or spaces. Seurat’s seascapes
thus show the viewer how vision and bodily movement help us make sense of, orient our-
selves within, and navigate our environment. Furthermore, Seurat’s depiction of differ-
ent views of a site within a single series is aimed at both illustrating and partially, if only
metaphorically, overcoming the fundamental discrepancy between our perception of the
external world and its representation in a single, static, two-dimensional painting. As such,
these seascape series constitute a remarkable response to the long-standing question of
how a flat painting can give the viewer access to the depth and three-dimensionality of the
real world. Rather than just employing some of the tools of traditional illusionism, Seurat
reconstitutes the movement of the eyes and body around the site, imaging the successive
visual perceptions we acquire through binocular vision and movement in space. The series
as a whole thus conveys a sense of the three-dimensionality and spatial fullness of the real
world that cannot be conveyed by a single, static impression from any one point of view.
In this light, the largely overlooked definition of painting that Seurat allegedly
proffered to Gustave Kahn, the Symbolist poet and leading Neo-Impressionist supporter,
takes on much more specific meaning. Painting, Seurat supposedly said to Kahn, is “the art
of hollowing out a surface,” that is, the art of creating a sense of depth on a flat canvas.20

25 seeing in series
 When considered in relation to Seurat’s interest in vision and in the ways that pictures
might re-create our visual experience of the external world, especially our perception of
space, this seemingly broad definition of painting suddenly gives a much more precise
indication of Seurat’s priorities. Furthermore, we can now read this comment as referring
not only to conventions and devices, such as linear perspective, that were traditionally
used to create the illusion of pictorial depth, but also to Seurat’s efforts to devise new
ways to reconstruct the three-dimensionality of the world in pictures, such as offering the
viewer multiple static views of the same objects and spaces in his seascape series.
It is in the context of Seurat’s sustained interest in how we successfully situate
ourselves within and navigate our surroundings that we should also interpret the pre-
dominance of certain motifs in the Honfleur pictures, as well as in his subsequent series.
The three lighthouses of Honfleur, for example, have everything to do with vision, and
with how information that is visually perceived can be used for spatial orientation and
navigation. The tremendous growth in maritime traffic during the nineteenth century,
along with an increase in the size and speed of ships, led France to develop and implement
an ambitious system of maritime beaconage, as well as modernize and enlarge many of
its ports. It did so, in part, through the construction of a comprehensive system of light-
houses, tide signals, buoys, beacons, semaphores, harbor lights, and various other kinds
of visual signaling mechanisms. Over the course of the century, France became the world
leader in the design, production, and sale of lighthouse apparatus and other maritime
signaling devices. Lighthouses were considered feats of nineteenth-century engineering
and design, as evidenced by the fact that lighthouses and other maritime signaling devices
were the subjects of regular concours or competitions for architecture students at the
École des Beaux-Arts throughout the nineteenth century.21 Of course, lighthouses were
also at the forefront of nineteenth-century optics, and some of the leading figures in that
field, such as Augustin Fresnel in France and David Brewster in Scotland, to cite just two
examples, were engaged in research on lighthouse illumination. Lighthouses were also
closely connected to developments in lighting technologies for much of the nineteenth
century; during precisely the same period that Seurat was producing his seascapes, French
lighthouses were undergoing key technological changes as they were being converted to
electricity. And, of course, questions regarding the conditions and limits of visibility, that
is, at what distances and under what conditions different kinds of lights, of various colors,
and of various intensities, were visible by navigators on the water, were absolutely central
to the research, design, and construction of the many kinds of beacons that Seurat depicts.
To give just one example, in Tip of the Jetty of Honeur (see fig. 7), Seurat depicts not only
the harbor light at the end of the jetty, but also the foghorn that had been installed to com-
municate with navigators when visibility was too poor for the lighthouse to be of use (fig.
15). The foghorn is a motif that thus explicitly addresses the conditions and limits of vision
as a means of helping us make sense of our surroundings. The prevalence of these motifs
in Seurat’s seascapes should be understood as a manifestation of the artist’s avid interest in

26 seeing in series
FIGURE 15
Photograph of the harbor light and
foghorn at the end of the western
jetty, Honfleur, n.d.
27
nineteenth-century advances in optics, in the various contingencies of sight, and in visual
experience as a means of understanding and situating ourselves within our environment.
Indeed, Seurat’s representation of multiple signaling structures within the same
image and his accumulation of views of these structures from different vantage points
in his series recall the way that maritime navigators would visually align or triangulate
these same kinds of landmarks in order to identify their position in space and chart their
course. That is to say, landmarks such as lighthouses, signal masts, harbor lights, and so on
were important for navigators not only in isolation as spatial markers and for the infor-
mation that they conveyed through their flags, flashing lights, and the like, but they were
also useful when seen in relation to each other. Just as many of Seurat’s seascape pictures
image more than one of these structures and map their spatial relationship to one another,
so too did maritime navigators determine their locations and routes based in part on the
relationships between and among these landmarks. As such, both individually and as a
series, Seurat’s seascapes reconstitute an essential navigational practice that enabled one
to determine one’s position in space by looking at multiple beacons from single and multi-
ple points of view.22
To understand Seurat’s series as an investigation into how vision enables us to make
sense of the world around us greatly helps to clarify the particular model of vision with
which he was working, as does looking at the series in the context of Helmholtz’s writ-
ings. It is a model that contrasts in fundamental ways with the one that dominated the
discourse on Impressionism, and it is these crucial differences, as well as the distinctions
between the series practices of Seurat and Monet, that I want to lay out. To begin, viewing
Seurat’s seascapes in relation to Helmholtz underscores the importance of the cognitive
aspect of visual perception to the artist’s work. As Helmholtz repeatedly stressed, our
seeing in series
 sense of distance, location in space, solidity, and so on, are the products of mental acts,
rather than of purely sensory information.23 Seurat’s seascape practice thus foregrounds
the relationship between sensation and cognition, and, in so doing, constitutes a medita-
tion not only on how we see but also on how we comprehend the external world. Seurat’s
seascapes should thus be seen as an epistemological inquiry into how vision enables us to
decipher the objects and spaces around us. Furthermore, Seurat’s seascape paintings make
evident the contingency of cognition on our continual and active sensory and corporeal
engagement with our environment. Accordingly, the seascape pictures situate perception
and cognition as taking place within expanded spatial and temporal parameters; it is when
the observer moves in and through space, carefully observing each part of the site from
different points of view and over time, that vision yields the fullest comprehension of the
outside world. Attentive and extended observation is also the mode of looking required
for understanding the relationship between and among the paintings in a single series.
Slowly, the viewer works through each image in relation to the others, gradually recog-
nizing the spatial overlaps and motific repetitions by means of a sustained study of the
canvases both individually and as a group.24
In all of these ways, Seurat’s concept of visual experience and its representation in
pictures is antithetical to the one that prevailed in the discourse on Impressionism and to
the notion of vision and painting that is manifest in Monet’s series practice. Indeed, the
specific logic of Seurat’s seascape series emerges even more clearly when one compares
these paintings to the work of Claude Monet. Considered by many at the time to be the
premier modern landscape painter, Monet also adopted the series as his main mode of
landscape production. But even though Monet is often considered the father of the land-
scape series, his own series practice and that of Seurat were developing almost simulta-
neously. The few art historians who have written about Seurat’s seascapes have tended to
rely rather heavily, if usually implicitly, on Monet’s model of the series, leading some to
hypothesize, for example, that the individual pictures in Seurat’s series represent the site
at different times of day. But a comparison of Monet’s and Seurat’s series makes plain the
two artists’ quite distinct conceptions of landscape painting, premised on very different
concepts of vision and its pictorial representation.
I first want to contextualize each artist’s serial practice within the discourse sur-
rounding Impressionism that developed during the 1870s and that culminated in Monet’s
landscape series of the 1880s and after, and within and against which Seurat situated his
own work. It has long been commonplace to understand Impressionism in terms of the
artists’ attempt to represent ephemeral effects in the external world and their individ-
ual visual experiences of these effects. Likewise, the supposed rapidity of their methods
of picture-making has long been understood as aimed at capturing a fleeting instant
of visual experience in paint. What has been somewhat less explicit in the literature on
Impressionism is the specific model of visual experience that the artists developed and pic-
tured in their works. That is, the Impressionists’ emphasis on ephemeral elements in the

28 seeing in series
 external world and on the constant flux of visual perception posited a definition of visual
experience as constituted by a series of fragments or cuts from a larger spatial and tempo-
ral continuum. For example, one of the features that the diverse kinds of images produced
by different Impressionists had in common was the absence of conventional composi-
tional principles, so that the images would seem precisely like partial glimpses of a larger
scene. This impression was created by means of various compositional techniques such as
eliminating a central and single point of focus, displacing key elements of the scene from
the center to the edges of the picture, conspicuously cropping parts of the depicted scene
at the edges of the canvas or paper, and representing the subjects from askew or somehow
unconventional angles. All of these techniques were employed, paradoxically, to give the
impression of an absence of composition, that is, to convey a sense of the immediacy of
visual experience and its representation in pictures, and to indicate that the images were
fragments of a larger scene perceived at a brief instant in time. In short, Impressionist
pictures often appear to be spatial and temporal cuts or fragments, although the temporal
parameters of vision tended to dominate the discourse on Impressionism. Each image—be
it one of Renoir’s scenes of bourgeois sociability, Degas’s renderings of the minute ges-
tures and dance maneuvers of his ballerinas, or Monet’s landscape images of the flicker of
sunlight, shadows, and reflections on the surface of water—was understood to be the rep-
resentation of fleeting phenomena, the impression that a portion of a scene made on the
individual artist at a particular moment in time.
Even a cursory glance at the criticism on Monet, as well as at writings by the artist,
reveal the importance of a fragmented notion of time and vision to his work. Over and
over again in letters to Alice Hoschedé, to sympathetic critics such as Gustave Geffroy and
Octave Mirbeau, or to Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet writes of his continuous attempts to fix
the instantaneous on canvas, to recapture in paint what his eyes perceived during a brief
interval of time: “In short,” Monet wrote to Geffroy in 1889, “by force of transformations
I am following nature without being able to seize her; and then this river that falls, rises
again, one day green, then yellow, now dry, and which tomorrow will be a torrent.” The
multiple temporal markers—“then,” “again,” “one day,” “now,” “tomorrow”—that Monet uses
to structure his account of viewing and painting the landscape suggest that he understood
visual experience as constituted by a series of temporally brief fragments. The rise and fall
of the river, the colored reflections on the surface of the water, the atmospheric conditions
in the landscape, as well as Monet’s perceptions of these external phenomena, all undergo
rapid and significant changes in his account. The model of vision that Monet articulates
here and elsewhere closely aligns with discussions of Impressionism by many contempo-
rary critics. The notion that Monet’s paintings constitute cuts in time (and, more implicitly,
in space as well) is astutely articulated, for example, in the following critical assessment of
his work from 1889: “Claude Monet, in effect, is not content to look at things in the exten-
sion of the landscape, he looks at them in time; he sees them enliven the hours that slip
away, and what he paints are not only corners of nature, but instants of nature, if I may

29 seeing in series
 express myself thus.” And it is precisely as representations of instants of visual percep-
tion that Félix Fénéon, among others, characterized Impressionist pictures, writing that
“their landscapes were corners of nature seen with a rapid glance, as if through a suddenly
opened and closed porthole,” that is, impressions perceived in the blink of an eye.25
As intimated in his letter to Geffroy, Monet’s pursuit of ephemeral optical effects in
his work entailed a great deal of frustration for the artist. Some of his other letters from
the 1880s and 1890s communicate even more directly the sense of disappointment and
failure that accompanied his attempts to represent transient visual experiences in paint.
Often, Monet would blame his perceived lack of success on the mutability of weather and
light conditions. But one also finds in his letters an acknowledgment of the near impos-
sibility of rendering “finished” paintings of fleeting perceptions, due to the discrepancy
between the supposed instant of perception and the lengthier time of pictorial execution.
In the letter to Geffroy quoted above, Monet stated that he was able to visually perceive
or “follow” the constant flux of the appearance of the landscape, but was unsuccessful
in his attempts to represent or “seize” a visual cut from this ceaseless stream of optical
impressions. Importantly, Monet’s dismay had only to do with the difficulties of repre-
senting these fragments of perception, not with the ostensible flux and instability of visual
experience per se, a flux that he, in fact, seemed to embrace. That is, in his writings, Monet
repeatedly distinguished between the act of seeing the constantly changing landscape,
always rendered in positive terms, and that of painting it, which was a constant battle. “I
have again taken up things impossible to do,” Monet writes in another letter to Geffroy
from 1890. “Water with grasses that undulate in the depths . . . it is admirable to see, but it
is enough to drive one mad to wish to do it.”26 In this letter and in others, Monet articu-
lates an opposition between the experience of “seeing” the rapidly changing scene, which
he characterized as “admirable,” and the “impossibility” of “do[ing] it,” that is, representing
his fleeting perceptions in paint. This opposition between the pleasure of looking at the
ever-changing landscape and the agony of pictorially reproducing it indicates that Monet’s
anxiety was not in any way epistemological. In other words, he was not concerned that the
unstable nature of vision prevented him from understanding the world, but rather that it
was so difficult to represent the evanescent in a pictorially satisfactory way.
To go further, Monet’s notion of visual experience as an instantaneous phenom-
enon implicitly severs it from any cognitive processes, a crucial difference between his
conception of sight and that of Seurat. The following reminiscence by the American
painter Lilla Cabot Perry, in which she recounts the advice given to her by Monet when
she visited him in 1889, succinctly illustrates this point: “When you go out to paint,” Monet
instructs her, “try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or
whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak
of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, until it gives your own naive impression of
the scene before you.” According to this account, Monet himself characterized his notion
of vision, in which the external world is reduced to a flat, chromatic array, as “naive,” that

30 seeing in series
FIGURE 16
Claude Monet, Regatta at
Argenteuil, c. 1872. Oil on canvas,
187/8 × 291/2 in. (48 × 75 cm). Musée
d’Orsay, Paris.
is, a pre- or even anti-cognitive notion of visual perception that could hardly be further
from Seurat’s model of vision.27 Monet’s Regatta at Argenteuil (fig. 16) could be understood
as a kind of demonstration of the deliberately naive vision that he advised Cabot Perry to
pursue. Not only are the houses, trees, and sailboats above the waterline represented with
just a few strokes of quickly applied paint, but Monet completely abstracts these objects in
their reflections on the surface of the water. Cabot Perry goes on to write that Monet “said
he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could
have begun to paint in this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before
him.” This passage makes absolutely clear that Monet’s notion of painting was grounded in
the representation of visual sensation divorced from cognition and, thus, was disengaged
from any kind of inquiry into how we come to know the external world.28
The difficulty of producing aesthetically satisfactory paintings based on his “naive”
vision not only instilled a sense of frustration in the artist, but also had long been the
grounds for critics’ condemnation of Impressionism. The supposed rapidity and spon-
taneity of Impressionist procedures necessary for representing a momentary impression
sur le motif, without preparatory works, opened the Impressionists to the charge that
their paintings were pictorially incomplete or aesthetically insufficient. As Steven Levine
has discussed in his thorough study of Monet’s critical reception, “underlying the con-
troversy [surrounding Monet’s work] was the persistent question as to whether Monet’s
pictures, allegedly observed and recorded directly from nature, constituted fully realized
paintings, i.e., tableaux, rather than mere études, pochades, ébauches, morceaux, or any of the
other designations employed to diminish, if only semantically, the stature of the artist’s
achievement.” The derogatory characterization of Monet’s pictures as morceaux or études

31 seeing in series
 was meant to imply their incompleteness or insufficiency, in contrast to the visual and
aesthetic totality of a tableau.29 Monet’s concept of painting as a representation of frag-
ments of perceptual experience thus carried with it the danger that his paintings were also
aesthetic fragments rather than fully realized wholes. The notion that each image repre-
sented a unique set of effects in the external world and a single instant of vision, combined
with Monet’s concerns about the pictorial insufficiency of any single work, directly paved
the way for the development of his series practice. If the Impressionist aesthetic of the
morceau or étude rendered the production of a tableau impossible, then perhaps groups
of works could substitute for the single masterpiece. Although Monet’s most well-known
series are his Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and Water Lilies, throughout the 1880s
Monet devoted most of his attention to producing series of seascapes. With the exception
of the Water Lilies, his 1880s seascape campaigns constitute the most prolific serial work of
his entire career.
The first pictures that Monet executed of the same motif and then exhibited as a
group were his 1876–1877 paintings of the Saint-Lazare train station, seven of which were
shown in the third Impressionist exhibition, and which were referred to by several critics
as “series.” This series would actually prove to be somewhat anomalous within Monet’s
œuvre, in that the Gare Saint-Lazare paintings incorporate a larger than usual number of
variables, such as the artist’s viewing position as he moves in and around the station, the
transient atmospheric elements of smoke, steam, and light, the comings and goings of the
trains, and so on. But as Monet’s series practice developed, the variable of his own physical
position in relation to the depicted scene was minimized and, in some cases, eliminated
altogether. Indeed, in series such as his 1881 paintings of Fécamp, the 1882 paintings from
Pourville, Varengeville, and Dieppe, the paintings of Étretat from 1883 and 1885–86, and
the 1886 works of Belle-Île (to name only his major 1880s campaigns near France’s north-
ern and western coasts), and then in his Poplars, Haystacks, and Rouen Cathedral series of
the 1890s, the motif appears to be very similar, in some cases almost identical, from one
painting to the next. Color becomes the key variable within each series, the chromatic
variations signifying internal changes in the artist’s perception of the motif, external
changes in time of day, season, or atmospheric conditions (which were often highlighted
in the titles of the works), or the interaction between changing internal and external phe-
nomena. In this way the supposedly incomplete single painting was supplemented and
made whole by the production of series of paintings. Importantly, the sense of totality or
fullness produced by Monet’s series is primarily aesthetic in nature, rather than an attempt
to render a “truth” about the motif or to somehow enhance our knowledge of it through
multiple renderings in paint. An 1892 letter from Octave Mirbeau to Monet describing
the critic’s reaction to the Poplars series exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery articulates
this desired effect of aesthetic totality: “It is an absolutely admirable work, this series, one
work, in which you again renew yourself by craft and sensation and where you attain the
absolute beauty of grand decoration. I experienced there complete joys, and emotion I

32 seeing in series
 cannot render.” According to Mirbeau, the series is actually “one work,” each individual
painting subsumed within the larger whole; his characterization of the series as possessing
“the absolute beauty of grand decoration,” one that produces “complete joys” in the viewer,
conveys a sense of aesthetic wholeness that has little to do with the depicted motif.30
For both Monet and Seurat, then, the status of vision and of painting as a fragment
was central to their series production. And yet, within this shared concern, Seurat’s work
should be understood as more anti- than Neo-Impressionist. His anti-Impressionism
is evident in his deep engagement with the cognitive dimensions of perception, in his
attempt to supersede the epistemological limits of the single perceptual impression, and
in his notion of vision as taking place within extended, rather than fragmented or com-
pressed, temporal and spatial parameters. Relatedly, Seurat’s sustained visual and corpo-
real interaction with the sites that he depicts contrasts quite starkly with Monet’s more
spectatorial relationship to the landscapes that he represents. Seurat’s mode of productive
sensory, cognitive, and bodily engagement also offers an alternative model of perambu-
lation to the one that looms so large in discussions of later nineteenth-century France,
namely, the deliberately aimless, undirected gaze and movement of the flâneur.31
Despite the fundamental differences between the series of Monet and Seurat, they
nevertheless shared one important attribute, that is, very specific exhibition requirements.
The desire on the part of both artists to exhibit their series as series necessitated exhibition
venues outside of the Salon or even the Impressionist exhibitions. The private galleries of
Paul Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit allowed Monet to mount one-man shows or to partic-
ipate in very small group exhibitions, both of which gave him the opportunity to show his
series in their entireties. Seurat had a different venue that enabled him to exhibit each sea-
scape series as a group and to show them alongside his figural paintings and drawings—the
Salon des Artistes Indépendants. The two founding tenets of the Salon des Indépendants,
organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which had formed in 1884, were the
absence of a selection committee and the eschewing of awards—“No jury, no prizes” was
its famous motto. Any artist who paid the requisite fee was allowed to exhibit his or her
work in the annual Salon des Indépendants. A third feature of the newly founded exhibi-
tion forum was also widely touted, namely, that each participant could exhibit up to ten
works at a time. The importance of the relationship between and among an artist’s individ-
ual works, and the notion that the meaning of any single work derived at least in part from
the larger exhibition grouping to which it belonged, were thus embedded in the founding
principles of the Société. Nothing could be further from the tradition of the Salon, which
encouraged the production of single, grand paintings that were meant to stand on their
own; although the jury might select more than one painting by the same artist for exhibi-
tion, the artist had no control over which or how many of the works would be shown (nor
over how their works would be hung); each work, therefore, needed to be autonomous and
self-contained, a single masterpiece impressive enough to attract the approval of the jury,
and one whose meaning was not reliant on other pictures in the artist’s œuvre.

33 seeing in series
 The possibilities opened to artists by the Indépendants’ generous exhibition policy
were widely acknowledged by both artists and critics. Marcel Fouquier wrote, for exam-
ple, “The considerable number of works shown is explained by the fact that the rules only
limit the number of entries per artist to ten. One could not be more hospitable. . . . This
system of rules can be of service to artists of talent, who desire to show the public and the
critics a series of works executed with the same spirit or, on the contrary, ones that pres-
ent curious contrasts in their execution.” Fouquier’s language in this passage is important,
for he uses the term “series” to refer to the group of works submitted by an artist to the
exhibition, suggesting that the exhibition policy itself puts a new stress on the connections
between and among the works shown by any single artist. Another critic’s description of
the Indépendants’ exhibitions very aptly characterizes the importance of this venue for
artists such as Seurat: “There are those who, feeling that they cannot be judged on one
or two canvases admitted into the Salon, turn to the Indépendents where the number of
entries is unlimited, to show works of an ensemble, to show series of studies, that would
be a shame to disperse.”32
For the most part, critics did write about Seurat’s seascape series as groups of pic-
tures, characterizing them as études, vues, or coins, terms that, furthermore, ground the
pictures in the artist’s direct visual experience of the sites. Claims of Seurat’s visual atten-
tiveness and fidelity to appearances were quite common in the contemporary criticism
on these paintings, as well as in later art historical interpretations.33 For example, Émile
Verhaeren wrote that Seurat’s artistic practice was structured around the completion of “a
large canvas in winter . . . and then, in summer, to wash his eyes of the days in the studio
and to translate as exactly as possible the vivid light, with all its nuances. An existence
divided into two, by art itself.” The critic Roger Marx wrote of how “Seurat succeeds very
well in giving in his [landscape] studies the idea of the sight that he has before his eyes,”
while Jules Christophe praised Seurat’s “very accurate views of the sea.” One anonymous
critic, describing the contents of Seurat’s studio, astutely characterized his seascapes as
“the studies brought back from a stay by the sea or in the country—a stay not of rest and
vacation, but of relentless work and documentary stockpiling.”34 Although the author of this
passage is unknown, the fact that he visited Seurat’s studio indicates that it was someone
close to the artist. As such, the terms he used to describe Seurat’s seascape pictures might
well have been inflected by the artist’s own comments. For this last critic, then, Seurat’s
seascapes were not only rooted in direct observation, but were about his visual relation-
ship to the sites he depicted. Seurat’s 1890 letter to the writer Maurice Beaubourg, long
believed by scholars to have been unsent by the artist—although clear evidence exists to
the contrary—is instructive to consult in this regard (see fig 43). Seurat listed his seascapes
not by individual title, but rather as études, more specifically, études faites à Honeur, études
faites aux Crotoy, and so on.35 Rather than identifying these pictures as preparatory works,
which they obviously were not, Seurat’s designation of them as études infuses each picture
with a sense of the partial and the contingent and thereby subtly conveys their status as

34 seeing in series
FIGURE 17
Photograph of the entrance to the
port of Honfleur showing the east-
ern and western jetties, the harbor
lights, and the tide signal, n.d.
FIGURE 18
Photograph of the lighthouse of
the hospital and the western jetty
of Honfleur, n.d.
35
parts of a larger series. The use of the term étude also very much grounds the images in the
artist’s observations of the locale. Seurat’s own characterization of his seascape pictures,
then, explicitly frames them in relation to his direct visual experience of these sites and
underscores the dependence of the meaning of any single work on the series as a whole.
Photographs of the sites in Honfleur that Seurat painted from the same period (figs.
17, 18) confirm the artist’s fidelity to appearances and to visual incident in his pictures, as
does a close examination of individual works. That is, the particular model of attentive
and active visual engagement that Seurat puts forward in his seascape series is manifest
not only in their group logic, but also in the individual canvases. One can see in a painting
such as Hospice and Lighthouse (see fig. 8) a commitment to the representation of numerous
visual details in the scene: the exact structure of the lighthouse, the precise roofline, win-
dows, gables, and chimneys of the mariners’ hospice on the right, the spokes of the broken
wheel on the far right closer to the foreground, the delicate wooden slats of the jetty in the
distance, and so on. These details situate the painting as an exercise in careful and pro-
longed visual study of one’s environment. In some cases, Seurat’s inclusion of details also
acts as a kind of test of his (and his viewer’s) comprehension of the identity of these vari-
ous objects. In the foreground of The Maria (see fig. 13), for example, the black anchor post,
or bollard, to which the ship is tied is represented with enough clarity to make its function
and identity easily discernible. Directly behind this bollard is an identical post, situated
further away from the viewer and thus depicted in much less detail. Would we be able to
identify the object further back in space without seeing the one in front of it and inferring
that the two objects are the same? That is, despite the lesser amount of visual information
provided to us, can we still recognize the object, based on our association of this form
with the object in the foreground? The same question presents itself in relation to the two
lampposts lined up just behind the bollards, one situated a bit further back than the other.
The one closer to the foreground is fairly easily recognizable, and it enables the viewer to
identify the much less clearly rendered object behind it. Seurat thus employs various ele-
ments in the scene to explore the relationship between perception and cognition, giving
seeing in series
 the viewer varying levels of visual information or cues to test one’s discernment of these
objects. The specificity of Seurat’s representations of certain parts of Honfleur is all the
more noticeable in comparison with the sea and sky in these pictures, the aspects of the
site that extend far beyond the edges of the canvas. These parts of the paintings are gen-
erally uninflected by any visual detail, as if to emphasize that they can never be visually
grasped or pictorially represented in their entirety.
It is in terms of testing the limits of our visual reach that Seurat’s rendering of
objects in the far background, close to the horizon, takes on new import. As I’ve already
argued, Seurat’s attention to the horizon line is consistent throughout his seascape
series. But his interest in that which lies just in front of it, at the edges of perceptibility, is
also noteworthy. In Hospice and Lighthouse, we see two lighthouses juxtaposed with one
another; one of them is well within our visual grasp, the particulars of the structure easily
perceptible, while the other one, in the background, is much less visible and almost blurs
into the coastal landscape in the far distance. Likewise, the main motifs of Mouth of the
Seine, Evening (see fig. 11) are the rows of wooden breakwaters on the beach, almost the
only details in an otherwise very spare representation of shore, sea, and sky. These posts,
rendered as thick and weighty in the immediate foreground, lose some of their substan-
tiality and visual distinctness in the middle distance. Parallel and close to the horizon
line, a row of similar vertical shapes appears, just at the boundary of perceptibility and
on the verge of disappearing altogether from sight. Mouth of the Seine, Evening is also one
of only three paintings in Seurat’s body of seascapes in which he foregrounds ephemeral
atmospheric conditions, the other two being Grandcamp (Evening) (1885) (see fig. 5) and
The Channel of Gravelines, An Evening (1890) (see fig. 41). As all three represent twilight or
nighttime scenes, it would seem that Seurat’s interest lies not in fleeting effects in general,
but rather and more specifically in the contingency of vision on light, exploring the lim-
ited visibility that results from the gradual dwindling of light at nightfall.
One Honfleur painting uniquely manifests Seurat’s interest in the cognitive aspect
of visual experience and the notion that vision is more a mental act of decipherment than
a purely sensory experience through the inclusion of language in the represented scene.
The Maria (see fig. 13) exemplifies Seurat’s studied attention to the world of visual inci-
dent, in this case, the various parts of the ship and surrounding basin. If we look closely
and for a long time at the work, we will eventually notice the signage that runs along the
top of the white, flat-roofed building in the far background. Its faint letters exist on the
border between perceptibility and imperceptibility, but if one persists in attempting to
decipher these marks, one may finally be able to figure out that the sign says “Honfleur
& Londres via Southhampton.” I would argue that this sign, and the viewer’s struggle
to make the marks cohere into legible letters and words, function as an example and a
symbol of the cognitive component of visual experience, in which mental comprehen-
sion, rather than mere sensation, is the goal. Here Seurat presents vision in unmistakably
epistemological terms, as certain phenomena must be seen with enough clarity to cohere

36 seeing in series
 as comprehensible signs. One might even see an analogy being posited here between our
visual perception of the world and our understanding of language. Indeed, Helmholtz
repeatedly compared our visual impressions to linguistic signs, arguing that both had an
arbitrary relationship to their referents in the real world and that the meaning of both was
learned rather than innate.36
The testing that Seurat performs in these pictures pertains to the conditions and
limits not only of perception, but also of representation. That is, Seurat’s rendering of
various objects in the represented scenes explores the different levels and kinds of sig-
nifying cues necessary to make these objects recognizable to the viewer. One has no
difficulty making out the blue and red flags on the right side of The Maria, for example,
but the flag in the background in the far left of the image is barely identifiable, composed
of just enough paint marks to make the object register as a flag. The famous point of
Neo-Impressionism (although Seurat’s works are not actually composed solely of dots of
pigment) thus serves as a unit not only of visual sensation but also of signification, with
different numbers and combinations of dots representing a flag, a sailboat in the far dis-
tance, and so on.37 Again and again, the perceptibility and legibility of certain elements
within Seurat’s seascapes are not presented as a given. Rather, different parts of the scene
are depicted with varying levels of detail and clarity, deliberately situated within, just at
the threshold of, or beyond our visual and cognitive reach.
Seurat’s attention to visual detail in his seascapes, in conjunction with his supple-
menting of individual views through the production of series of pictures, successfully
reconciles two long-standing, competing aims in the landscape painting tradition: adher-
ence to visual observation and the creation of a sense of visual, as well as aesthetic, total-
ity. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed Monet’s concerns about the aesthetic or pictorial
sufficiency of his individual paintings, rooted in critiques of his pictures as mere études
or morceaux, rather than fully realized tableaux—critiques that he responded to with the
production of series of paintings. Seurat, too, seems to have taken these kinds of distinc-
tions seriously, characterizing his seascape paintings in one of the drafts of his letter to
Beaubourg as “études de paysage” and his figural paintings as “grandes toiles.” His practice
of producing series of seascapes could thus also be seen as an attempt, in part, to over-
come not only the limits of vision from any single, stationary vantage point, but also the
pictorial or aesthetic limitations of the single landscape painting. Another way to put it
would be that the series format allowed Seurat to reconcile fidelity to his visual observa-
tions with the desire to produce a sense of pictorial totality. Indeed, landscape artists had
long been aware of a fundamental tension within the landscape painting project between
creating a picture of a particular landscape scene and achieving a sense of aesthetic, tem-
poral, and spatial autonomy and self-sufficiency in the picture. The tradition of ideal land-
scape painting, exemplified by the work of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, followed
an aesthetic in which real elements of the landscape were arranged and supplemented
according to the rational principles of order, harmony, and, of course, linear perspective,

37 seeing in series
 thereby producing a well-ordered tableau. The lateral expansion of the horizon was
counteracted by a variety of pictorial devices, such as linear perspective, that pulled the
viewer’s eye back into pictorial space, and by various foreground elements that guided
the viewer’s gaze away from the edges of the painting and toward its center. This tension
between the landscape site painted mimetically as a fragment or supplemented and syn-
thesized into a fully realized tableau is discussed by Poussin in his famous letter to Sublet
de Noyers. Poussin here uses the terms “aspect” and “prospect” to designate these two
distinct conceptions of seeing and representing the landscape: “One must understand . . .
that there are two manners of viewing objects, one by seeing them simply, and the other
by considering them with attention. To see simply is nothing other than to receive natu-
rally in the eye the form and the appearance of the thing seen. But to see an object with
consideration, that is beyond the simple and natural reception of the form in the eye, one
seeks with a particular application the means to understand well this same object: further-
more one can say that the simple aspect is a natural operation, and that which I name the
prospect is an office of reason that depends on three things: knowledge of the eye, of the
visual ray, and the distance from the eye to the object.”38 For Poussin, the aspect signified
a mode of looking and painting that contented itself with the reproduction of the visual
appearance of the world; the prospect represented the world as ordered and perfected
by the artist, most explicitly through the use of central point perspective (with which the
term “prospect” shares its etymology). The former lacks composition, selection, and order-
ing, and is essentially a transcription of one’s visual perception onto canvas. In short, it is a
morceau or étude, while the prospect is the autonomous tableau.
The inherently finite nature of the canvas and of the landscape view presented
on it was signified by the frame of the picture, which, in a tableau, had to be naturalized
through a variety of means. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, a painter who published a
highly influential treatise on landscape painting in 1799 entitled Éléments de perspective pra-
tique, commented on the impossibility of encompassing the vastness of the landscape itself
within the physical means of the easel painting. He wrote, “an ordinary landscape painting
cannot perfectly reveal the whole position of a site, because the space that it represents is
circumscribed by a frame.”39 The frame, as the most visible manifestation of the limits of
the canvas, emphasizes the fact that the depicted landscape scene is inevitably a fragment
of a larger whole. Even though the nineteenth century marked the period in which, at least
in France, realism came to triumph over the ideal landscape, the discourse on painting
as a totality versus a fragment, phrased as the difference between a tableau or œuvre and
a morceau or étude, remained very much alive throughout much of the century. Many
landscape artists during this time struggled to reconcile fidelity to their perception with
the compositional and aesthetic demands of the tableau, seeking to represent some kind of
spatial or visual totality within the limited parameters of the easel painting.
Panorama painting, which was born at the very end of the eighteenth century and
which died at the very end of the nineteenth century, fulfilled the competing demands of

38 seeing in series
FIGURE 19
Panorama Rotunda in the Place
d’Austerlitz, Paris. Published in
Nouvelles Annales de la
Construction, N. 329, May 1882.
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
39
specificity of locale and a frameless spatial and visual totality. The term “panorama” was
a neologism invented to describe circular paintings that reproduced 360-degree views of
cityscapes, landscapes, battle scenes, and so on. Comprising the Greek words pan, mean-
ing “all,” and horama, meaning “view,” the term itself underscores the fact that seemingly
unbounded visibility was central to the appeal of this new type of pictorial phenomenon.
Invented in Scotland in 1787 by Robert Barker and brought to France in 1799, the first
panorama exhibited in Paris depicted a view of the city from the top of the dome of the
Tuileries Palace. The advertisements all around Paris announced that “the panorama, or
picture without a frame, representing a superb View of Paris and Its Environs seen from the
top of the Tuileries Palace, is open daily at the new rotunda.”40 The claim of the absence of
a frame was actually only half-true. While panorama paintings expanded laterally in a full
circle, the canvas did have top and bottom edges, but the design of the exhibition space
prevented the viewer from seeing them (fig. 19). Visitors entered the circular panorama
building and proceeded through a darkened hallway, giving them time to disassociate
themselves from the outside world in order to heighten the illusionism of the painted
scene. They would emerge onto a circular viewing platform in the exhibition room, sur-
rounded on all sides by the painting (fig. 20). A railing around the platform determined
how close visitors could come to the painting and was placed such that viewers were
unable to see the bottom edge of the picture. Furthermore, a kind of umbrella that hung
above the platform hid from view the top edge of the canvas and the source of the room’s
light, which was a series of skylights near the roof of the rotunda. Thus, as far as the vis-
itor could tell, the panorama was indeed a painting without borders, showing an endless
horizon that a single easel painting could never encompass.
Other than having the freedom to select the vantage point from which the scene was
depicted and viewed (a “single” vantage point that nevertheless far exceeded what could
actually be perceived in the real world from any individual viewing position), the pan-
orama painter was obligated to paint every aspect of the scene as “accurately” as possible
and to place the various aspects of the scene in their “correct” spatial relationships to one
another. Indeed, the pleasure of the panorama experience consisted of walking around the
seeing in series
FIGURE 20
Wood engraving by C. V. Nielsen of
Panorama of Constantinople by
Jules-Arsène Garnier, published in
Illustreret Tidende, volume 24, no.
1205, October 29, 1882, p. 55. The
Royal Library, Copenhagen.
40
platform and taking in the various parts of the expansive scene, all of which were joined
in a single visual and spatial continuum. The desire for a representation that exceeded
the limits of ordinary vision from any one vantage point, both laterally and toward the
horizon, was fully satisfied by the panorama, which offered a “faithful reproduction of the
appearance of a site viewed from all angles and as far as the eye can see.”41
The interest in panorama paintings steadily declined throughout Europe toward the
middle of the nineteenth century, but they experienced a tremendous revival in France
and Germany in the last third of the century, when they enjoyed greater popularity than
ever before. A panorama of the Siege of Paris was so widely visited during the 1878 Paris
Universal Exposition that a number of new companies were founded immediately after-
ward to capitalize on the panorama’s resurgence. The decade of the 1880s marked the peak
of the panorama revival in Paris. An 1884 Parisian guidebook exclaimed, “in the last few
years, there has been a perfect eruption of panoramas in every quarter of Paris.” Over the
course of the decade, several new panorama rotundas were built, and the 1889 Universal
Exposition in Paris offered visitors no less than seven different panoramas to enjoy. And,
of course, the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition, the Eiffel Tower, offered visitors actual
panoramic views of Paris from its viewing platforms. Seurat produced one of the very first
paintings of the tower the year of the Exposition.42
The late nineteenth-century ubiquity of panorama paintings in Paris has import-
ant and thus far overlooked connections with some of the preoccupations manifest in
Seurat’s seascape series. As we have seen, Seurat, too, was fundamentally concerned with
the limitations of any single view of one’s surroundings, and sought to compensate for
them through the production of series of paintings. The notion of the panorama painting
seeing in series
 as integrating multiple viewing positions into a single canvas had been addressed by
Étienne-Jean Delécluze, the prominent art theorist and critic, in his 1828 Précis d’un traité
de peinture: “The continuity of the apparent horizon line,” Delécluze writes, “is the main
thing that distinguishes the panorama painting from the framed painting. All we see in the
latter is the portion of the horizontal line that is embraced by the angle of vision; more-
over, there is only ever one vantage-point. With the panorama, whose surface is circular,
we proceed from angle of vision to angle of vision—in other words, from vantage-point to
vantage-point. As the spectator takes his gaze from one side to the other, his eyes, through
the proliferation of vantage-points, are subjected one after another to the optical phenom-
ena that belong to each angle of vision.” In addition, both Seurat’s series and panoramas
encouraged their viewers to work through the spatial relations between the different sites
in the picture (and, in Seurat’s case, among the sites represented in the multiple pictures of
a given series). As one visitor to a panorama of London wrote: “I would be charged with
exaggeration if I said that he who has seen the panorama of London has gone to London.
But it would not be false to say that he who has seen the panorama of London will be able
to find his bearings in London.”43 Lastly, the panorama, like Seurat’s series, was premised
on a notion of vision as characterized by spatial and temporal extension. Transient visual
effects such as time of day, weather, or movement were excluded by the panorama. Indeed,
one of the main complaints about panoramas was the absence of a sense of movement and
time from the pictures, and out of this criticism was likely born the diorama.
The basic principle behind the diorama was the use of intricate lighting techniques
to create the illusion of changes in light and movement on a two-dimensional surface.
Although it had its roots in various eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pictorial
phenomena, it was Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre who, in the early 1820s, invented what
was called the diorama. Like the panorama, dioramas were exhibited in specially designed
structures in which visitors traveled through a dark hallway to reach the viewing area. But
unlike the panorama, which was designed for visitors to wander around the platform and
take in different parts of the painted scene, the viewing space of the diorama was designed
like a theater, with benches, boxes, and seats that kept viewers in one place for the dura-
tion of the show. The diorama was framed by a stage-like opening that hid the edges of
the picture and helped to establish an illusion of great distance between the image and the
spectators. The picture itself was made of semi-transparent canvas that was illuminated
in various ways to create the impression of changes of weather and light and, later, move-
ment (figs. 21, 22).
Daguerre opened the first diorama in Paris on July 11, 1822, displaying two pictures,
one a Swiss mountain scene and the other a chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, each one
measuring about seventy by forty-five feet. Viewers watched as lighting effects produced
the illusion of the rising and setting of the sun in the landscape over a period of about
fifteen minutes, at which point the seating area pivoted and viewers found themselves

41 seeing in series
FIGURE 21
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,
Diorama of an Alpine Scene, n.d.
Harry Ransom Center, The
University of Texas at Austin.
Gernsheim Collection.
FIGURE 22
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,
Diorama of an Alpine Scene II, n.d.
Harry Ransom Center, The
University of Texas at Austin.
Gernsheim Collection.
42
facing the diorama of the cathedral interior. The basic appeal of the diorama experience
was the illusion of the compressed passage of time by means of changes in lighting on a
static, two-dimensional surface. This illusion, and the popularity of the diorama, increased
with Daguerre’s invention of what was called the “double-effect” diorama, which created
the impression not only of changing light but also of movement. Through scenes painted
on both the back and front of the canvas that were strategically and variably illuminated
by means of a series of lights, screens, and filters, the double-effect diorama offered the
viewer images, for example, of the interior of a church not only undergoing different
levels of illumination, but filling with worshippers who seated themselves in the pews,
observed midnight service, and then departed from the church.44
The panorama and the diorama are often closely associated as two nineteenth-cen-
tury popular pictorial entertainments, both of which drew large numbers of visitors eager
to experience new forms of pictorial illusionism. But the two kinds of pictures embody
quite different models of visual experience. While the panorama emphasized vision in
relation to spatial extension and conveyed a sense of temporal continuity through the
exclusion of ephemeral effects, the diorama compressed time and defined vision as deter-
mined by a series of rapid changes in the external world. Indeed, the primacy in certain
diorama pictures of changes in time of day, weather, and seasons closely parallels the
interests of the Impressionist landscape painters. A description of Daguerre’s Swiss moun-
tainscape diorama underscores this similarity: “The most striking effect is the change of
light. From a calm, soft, delicious, serene day in summer, the horizon gradually changes,
becoming more and more overcast, until a darkness, not the effect of night, but evidently
of an approaching storm—a murky, tempestuous blackness—discolors every object. . . .
This change in light upon the lake (which occupies a considerable portion of the picture) is
very beautifully contrived. The warm reflection of the sunny sky recedes by degrees, and
seeing in series
 the advancing dark shadow runs across the water—chasing, as it were, the former bright
effect before it.” And one visitor’s description of Daguerre’s Holyrood Chapel diorama
highlights the centrality of the representation of evanescent optical effects to this new
kind of picture: “If this be a painting, however exquisite, it still is something more; for the
elements have their motions, though the objects they illuminate are fixed.”45 So too, in
many Impressionist pictures, was the principal focus on these ephemeral “elements” in the
landscape, more than the fixed “objects they illuminate.”
The fact that Monet, late in his career, installed continuous panels of Water Lilies
in a circular exhibition space as a bequest to the French state may seem to contradict
my claim that his notion of vision is fundamentally not panoramic. And indeed, the
late Water Lilies installation in the Orangerie does constitute a significant departure
from Monet’s earlier paradigm of the representation of temporal and spatial fragments
of visual perception in his easel paintings. Writing in 1910 about his interest in creat-
ing this kind of installation, Monet stated: “I was tempted to use the water lily theme
to decorate a drawing room: carried around the walls, drawing them into its unity, it
would have produced an illusion of a whole without end, of a wave without a horizon
and without a shore.”46 Certainly, Monet’s plan for a circular arrangement of paintings
that enclosed the viewer on all sides mimics the format of a panorama painting. But
the scene depicted in Monet’s painting, as described by him in the letter, departs in key
respects from panorama pictures; instead of offering the viewer a vista that stretches
back in space as far as the eye could see, Monet’s paintings depict the opposite, that is, a
telescoped, close-up view of the surface of water. These pictures would, Monet specified,
be “without a horizon and without a shore,” that is, without the markers that not only
indicate spatial recession but that help viewers situate themselves in space in relation to
the painted site.
Turning back to Seurat’s seascapes, one of the central features of the post-Grand-
camp series—and a crucial difference between his series and panorama pictures—is their
foregrounding of the artist’s movement in space and the multiplicity of distinct, noncon-
tiguous viewpoints that result from these perambulations. Although each panorama has a
viewing platform at the center (around which the painting is arranged) and the viewer is
encouraged to wander from place to place on the platform, the point of view represented
in the painting is essentially consistent. In other words, the panorama greatly expands the
visual reach of a single viewing position, while Seurat’s series, through a constantly shift-
ing point of view, enhance our understanding of a particular site by representing it from
multiple perspectives in space. Seurat’s series thus convey a sense of the three-dimension-
ality of a site in a way that is distinct from the spatial illusionism not only of panorama
paintings, but of post-Renaissance painting more generally. Instead, Seurat uses the series
format to explore wholly new means to assert the solidity and depth of the external world
on a flat, painted surface.47

43 seeing in series
 The summer of 1887 was the only one between 1885 and his death in the spring of
1891 that Seurat stayed in Paris for the duration, but the following summer he resumed
his seascape series practice. Port-en-Bessin was a small fishing village and port that was
mentioned only in passing, if at all, in contemporary tourist guides of Normandy and
northern France. Seurat produced six paintings of Port-en-Bessin’s interior basins, outer
harbor, jetties, semaphore, and surrounding sea and cliffs and, like the Honfleur series,
each picture of Port-en-Bessin depicts a part of the larger site that is visible in at least one
other painting in the series. As one can see in an aerial photograph of Port-en-Bessin, the
site consisted, in part, of two long curving jetties that create an outer harbor (fig. 23). The
platform next to the entrance to the two interior basins that protrudes slightly into the
outer harbor, called the Quai de l’épi, was the site of the fish market that appears in two of
Seurat’s Port-en-Bessin pictures but that was destroyed before this photograph was taken.
The passage from the outer harbor to the first interior basin was traversed by a small
rotating bridge that also appears in two of Seurat’s paintings of the site.
In Port-en-Bessin, The Jetties (Port-en-Bessin, Les jetées), Seurat depicts the tips of the
two jetties from a vantage point inside the harbor and looking out toward the sea, show-
ing a few boats about to enter or exit the protected waters of the harbor and many other
vessels out on the English Channel (fig. 24). Port-en-Bessin, A Sunday (Port-en-Bessin, Un
dimanche), as one can see in a photograph of that portion of the site, is set in the first of
two interior basins, with the tips of the jetties that were the focus of the previous painting
now much less visible and in the far background of the picture (figs. 25, 26). Immediately in
front of the jetties is the movable bridge that traverses the entrance to the basins, marked
by a series of short black dashes. This bridge is seen much more clearly and from a more
proximate vantage point in Port-en-Bessin, The Bridge and the Quays (Port-en-Bessin, Le pont
et les quais), Seurat having positioned himself near the entrance to the basins, looking west
toward the fish market and the cliffs in the distance (figs. 27, 28). These very same cliffs are

FIGURE 23
Aerial view of Port-en-Bessin,
post–World War II.

44 seeing in series
FIGURE 24
Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin,
The Jetties, 1888. Oil on canvas,
215/8 × 255/8 in. (54.9 × 65.1 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934
(126.1934).
45
shown from a closer perspective in The Grues and the Percée (fig. 29), and they also serve
as the vantage point for Port-en-Bessin, Outer Harbor (High Tide) (Port-en-Bessin, L’avant-
port [marée haute] ) (figs. 30, 31).48 In the latter painting, Seurat depicts the fish market and
the buildings around the entrance to the basins from a viewing position that is precisely
inverse to the one he took up in The Bridge and the Quays, looking east instead of west.
And, finally, in Port-en-Bessin, Outer Harbor (Low Tide) (Port-en-Bessin, L’avant-port [marée
basse] ), Seurat turns his back to the sea and depicts the entrance to the basins in the mid-
dle-right of the painting and the tip of the eastern jetty in the picture’s far left (fig. 32).
In addition to presenting a collection of overlapping views of the same parts of the
site from different points in space, some of the other key characteristics of the Honfleur
series are also found in Seurat’s Port-en-Bessin paintings. Once again, Seurat is partic-
ularly attentive to the site’s jetties, which were crucial for navigation in and out of the
port, and which also served as promenades that enabled the accumulation of views of
one’s surroundings.49 The jetties also allude to Seurat’s own perambulations around the
site and to the series of pictures that resulted from them, as well as to the importance of
visual engagement and bodily movement for making sense of our environment. As in his
1886 series, Seurat widely varies the range and amount of visual information in the Port-
en-Bessin series, thereby testing the artist’s representational capacities and the viewer’s
seeing in series

FIGURE 27
Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin,
The Bridge and the Quays, 1888. Oil
on canvas, 26 × 323/4 in. (66 × 83.2
cm). Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
The William Hood Dunwoody Fund
(55.38).
FIGURE 25 BELOW FIGURE 26
Georges Seurat, Port-en- Photograph of an interior
Bessin, A Sunday, 1888. Oil basin looking out toward
on canvas, 26 × 321/4 in. the jetties, Port-en-Bessin,
(66 × 82 cm). Kröller-Müller n.d.
Museum, Otterlo.
FIGURE 28
Photograph of the entrance to the
interior basins, looking west, Port-
en-Bessin, n.d.

FIGURE 30
Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin,
Outer Harbor (High Tide), 1888.
Oil on canvas, 263/8 × 321/4 in. (67 ×
82 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
FIGURE 29
Georges Seurat, The Grues and
the Percée, 1888. Oil on canvas,
255/8 × 317/8 in. (65.1 × 80.9 cm).
National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, D.C. Gift of the W. Averell
Harriman Foundation in memory
of Marie N. Harriman (1972.9.21).
FIGURE 31
Photograph of the outer harbor
seen from the cliffs to the west of
the port, Port-en-Bessin, n.d.
FIGURE 32
Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin,
Outer Harbor (Low Tide), 1888. Oil
on canvas, 213/8 × 261/4 in. (54.3 ×
66.7 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum.
Museum purchase (4:1934).
48
powers of decipherment, as well as conceding that certain phenomena exceed one’s visual
and representational grasp. Indeed, while images such as Outer Harbor (High Tide) and
The Bridge and the Quays are constituted by an abundance of visual detail, the spareness
of The Jetties and The Grues and the Percée speaks to the limits of perception and picto-
rial representation.
Like his previous series, the Port-en-Bessin pictures put forward a notion of visual
experience as taking place within temporally extended parameters. As such, they serve
as further examples of the fundamental differences between Seurat’s model of vision
and its representation and the Impressionists’ interest in representing the perceptual
instant. In fact, many critics defined Neo-Impressionism primarily as a rejection of the
Impressionists’ embrace of the instantaneous and the ephemeral, and of their osten-
sibly hasty methods of paint application. Gustave Kahn distinguished the two groups
from one another by writing that “Pissarro, Seurat, Signac . . . are particularly fond of
calm countrysides, less troubled waters, and wanted to give landscape not only its hour,
whatever that may be, but its silhouette of the entire day.” Another supporter of the
Neo-Impressionists articulated their difference from the Impressionists in similar terms
when he wrote that, “the word neo-impressionist bothers us. It is only chronologically
meaningful. . . . But nothing is less successful for characterizing the patient, thoughtful,
seeing in series
 sure art of Seurat or Signac, than this word: impressionist, which rather implies the
suddenness of vision, the seizing of the fugitive in nature, the fixing of a moment of
movement or light and also chance.”50 This critic’s juxtaposition of the “suddenness” of
Impressionist vision with the Neo-Impressionists’ “patient” art is important, and other
critics also noted the dilation of time with regard to the scenes that Seurat depicts, his
mode of looking at the sites, and the experience of viewing Seurat’s seascapes. Compare
the foregoing description of Impressionist vision to the following statement about
Seurat’s Port-en-Bessin series written by Octave Maus, cofounder of the influential jour-
nal L’Art moderne and secretary of the Belgian exhibition group Les XX, in whose shows
Seurat regularly participated: “Six paintings executed in Port-en-Bessin, the harvest of
last summer. . . . The eye rejoices in following, with the artist, the rectilinear quays, the
jetties, the bridges, breakwaters, dominated by the grassy mass of the cliffs, in probing the
depths of the green waters marbled by the fugitive shadows of the clouds, in measuring
the height of the lighthouses, searching the distant horizon of the sea. More than any of
the other canvases, A Sunday attracts: it is the recorded impression of captured repose,
in the fort decorated with flags, the solitude of the quays, and the pleasure of a peaceful
day.”51 Maus’s characterization of the seascapes as full of “repose” and “peace,” descrip-
tions that suggest the exclusion of momentary effects in favor of stasis and stability, are
typical of the critics’ reactions to Seurat’s seascapes. In addition, Maus described the
way the paintings reenact Seurat’s visual experience of the site, the viewer’s “eye, fol-
low[ing], with the artist,” the structures that make up the port and the elements of the
surrounding landscape in the individual images and in the series as a whole. This mode
of observation is not the Impressionists’ purely sensory blink of an eye, but rather one
that, according to Maus, “probes,” “measures,” and “searches” the site in question, system-
atically studying it part by part. And for all the rhetoric of Neo-Impressionist painting as
primarily concerned with color, that is, with the surface of things, Maus astutely char-
acterizes Seurat’s analytical gaze as one that reaches beneath surfaces and far out onto
the horizon, as one that explores heights and depths. It is, in short, a gaze that expands
in space and time, and one that actively investigates the external world in order to make
sense of it.
Seurat’s demonstrably active visual and corporeal engagement with the depicted
sites is absolutely in keeping with Helmholtz’s assertions of the necessity of our con-
tinuous visual observation of and physical contact with our surroundings. “Ordinarily,”
Helmholtz wrote, “we see with both eyes at the same time, turning them in the head first
one way and then the other, and likewise from time to time changing the position in
space not of the head only but of the whole body. Thus, we are in the habit of letting our
eyes roam about, xating first on one point and then another of the object in front of us.”
Furthermore, and crucially, Helmholtz repeatedly juxtaposed passive visual spectator-
ship with active visual engagement, insisting that it is the latter mode of perception that
enables us to make cognitive sense of our sensory impressions:

49 seeing in series
 We are not simply passive to the impressions that are urged on us, but we observe. That
is, we adjust our organs in those conditions that enable them to distinguish the im-
pressions most accurately. Thus, in considering an involved object, we accommodate
both our eyes as well as we can, and turn them so as to focus steadily the precise point
on which our attention is fixed . . . and then we let our eyes traverse all the noteworthy
points of the object one after another. . . . But if, from necessity or purpose, we employ
a different mode of looking at objects, that is, if we view them merely indirectly or
without focusing both eyes on them, or without surveying them all over . . . then we
shall not be able to have as accurate apperceptions as when the eyes are used in the
normal fashion.

Likewise, Helmholtz stressed the importance of our repeated physical engagement with
the objects and spaces of perception for learning to making sense of them: “The tests we
employ by voluntary movements of the body are of the greatest importance in strength-
ening our conviction of the correctness of the perceptions of our senses. And thus, as
contrasted with purely passive observations, the same sort of firmer conviction arises as is
derived by the process of experiment in scientific investigations.”52
As Octave Maus suggested, the Port-en-Bessin paintings reward those viewers
who “probe” and “search” them carefully and slowly. In fact, the basic strategy of Seurat’s
seascape series, namely, the representation of certain parts of a given site from different
perspectives, only becomes clear if one looks closely and attentively at the paintings. Part
of the function of the repetition of key motifs in each series—the lighthouse, jetties, harbor
lights, and tide signal of Honfleur, the jetties and semaphore of Port-en-Bessin—is to enable
the viewer to reconstruct the spatial relationships between and among the various scenes
depicted in the series, and thus to integrate the individual pictures into a coherent whole.
Furthermore, as I argued in relation to the Honfleur pictures, many of the individual sea-
scape paintings in the 1888 series contain visual details that require extended attention in
order to be noticed and then deciphered. Port-en-Bessin, A Sunday (see fig. 25), for example,
is composed with a geometric clarity that makes the painting initially seem rather easily
legible. It is only the viewer who lingers in front of the picture who might eventually see
the tiny human figures that Seurat has included in various parts of the scene. They come
into view, for example, immediately in front of the bridge in the center background of the
painting, just to the left of the opening between the two jetties. Another solitary figure
emerges directly beneath the white sign that protrudes from the side of the building on
the left-hand side of the work. Slowly, one begins to pick out other, nearly imperceptible
forms that may or may not represent figures. Sustained visual attention is rewarded, but it
is sometimes not enough to determine the identity of every object and detail, no matter the
effort expended.
A similar testing of the range and limits of vision is evident in Seurat’s other Port-
en-Bessin paintings, such as Outer Harbor (High Tide) (see fig. 30). The longer one studies

50 seeing in series

FIGURE 33
Chart of Tide Signals.
the picture, the more details one is able to make out, discovering numerous elements that
Seurat situates at the boundary of legibility. The figures near the fish market and the open-
ing to the inner harbor appear as mere clusters of dots, and the white sails of the boats in
the distance along the horizon almost blend into the clouds just above them. Conversely,
Seurat carefully delineates the individual blades of grass in the very near foreground of
the picture, illustrating the fact that relative spatial proximity rather than absolute size
often determines the perceptibility of objects in the world around us. In this case, figures
and boats are reduced to specks while single blades of grass are clearly visible. The scene
that we examine from a distance and from above in Outer Harbor (High Tide) is depicted
from much closer range in The Bridge and the Quays (see fig. 27). The formerly almost
imperceptible figures are here transformed into man, woman, and child, their individual
sex and postures now easily identifiable. The entrance to the basin and the surrounding
buildings come into much sharper focus, and the blades of grass on the distant cliffs that
were so distinct in the previous painting are now just part of a broad mass of greenery in
the far background. This pair of pictures makes clear the limitations of any single
vantage point for making sense of our surroundings, and illustrates that sustained
engagement must continually be undertaken in order to decipher our environ-
ment as fully as possible.
Outer Harbor (High Tide) offers yet another example of Seurat’s keen interest
in navigational aids that employ visually communicated codes, which I propose
are symbols for the artist’s epistemologically oriented definition of visual expe-
rience. If one looks closely at the painting, one is able to make out the tide signal
near the entrance to the basin, a motif that Seurat also took up in his previous
series (and that will appear in a subsequent series as well). The light flag with a
dark cross that is seen atop a tall mast is part of a universal tide signal code that
relates information to navigators about the changing tides and water levels by
displaying different combinations of balls and flags (fig. 33). As the tide signal chart
indicates, the flag in Outer Harbor (High Tide) visually communicates that which
Seurat’s title conveys by verbal means, namely, that the artist has depicted the port
at high tide.
Another important optical signaling device, the semaphore of Port-en-Bessin (fig. 34),
is visible on the distant cliffs of The Bridge and the Quays and is shown from a much closer
vantage point in the upper left corner of The Grues and the Percée (see fig. 29). The only
other element besides the semaphore in the latter painting, a remarkably spare composi-
tion, is a ship in the distance, far out on the water. As such, the very subject of The Grues
and the Percée seems to be the visual communication between semaphore and vessel, with
Seurat showing us both the sender and receiver of the visual signals used by each. Like
his interest in tide signals, Seurat’s focus on the semaphore of Port-en-Bessin should be
understood in the context of his broader engagement with the ways that vision enables us
to decipher, orient ourselves within, and navigate the world around us. Like lighthouses,

51 seeing in series
 harbor lights, and tide signals, semaphores—literally, sign bearers—are navigational aids
that communicate information by means of visual signals. Installed along France’s coast-
line during the nineteenth century and manned by operators who constantly surveyed the
horizon, coastal semaphores came to serve a variety of purposes. Consisting of a mast and
three movable arms, the positions of which corresponded to established signal codes (fig.
35), as well as variously shaped flags, semaphores could transmit a variety of information to
navigators, such as meteorological conditions, navigational dangers, the position of enemy
vessels, and so on. These optical telegraphs were supplemented with electrical telegraphy
in the mid-nineteenth century, situating them within a wider network of information and
communication. Semaphores could receive electrical telegraphs and then translate the
messages into visual form for navigators or passengers on the water, or they could receive
visual signals from vessels and forward them via electrical telegraphy. Ships corresponded
with semaphore operators by displaying specific combinations of flags and pennants,
another visual signaling system that relied on a universally understood code. Thus, sema-
phores have a great deal in common with the other navigational aids that Seurat depicts
in his seascapes, with one writer even referring to semaphores as “lighthouses of thought”
and “intelligent towers.”53 All of the beacons that Seurat depicts connect directly with issues
concerning the conditions and limits of vision, and all of them associate vision with the
acquisition of knowledge of one’s environment. These motifs thus exemplify the central
idea at work in Seurat’s seascapes, namely, that vision is not a purely sensory phenomenon
but, rather, is fundamentally tied to cognition, and is a key means for us to learn about and
find our way in the world around us.
One central aspect of the ports that evokes not only the issues of visibility and invis-
ibility more generally but also the relationship between time and vision is the tides. While
two of Seurat’s Port-en-Bessin pictures, Outer Harbor (High Tide) and Outer Harbor (Low
Tide), directly address the subject of the tide cycles, tides are in fact the implicit subject of
many of Seurat’s seascape pictures, insofar as they dictate the movement of vessels into
and out of the ports and, thus, structure the very rhythm of port life. These two 1888 pic-
tures render the entrance to the port at high and low tides, and thus foreground the effects
of the tidal cycles both on the appearance of the port and on the movement of ships in and
out of the harbor. Outer Harbor (Low Tide) depicts that which is visible when the waters
recede at low tide, the lower half of the jetty in the far left of the work, which is sometimes
submerged underwater, shown to be much darker than the top half, which is always above
the water. The two paintings constitute yet another way that Seurat uses the series format
to acknowledge and supplement the limits of sight and representation, each depicting that
which cannot be seen in the other work and offering views of the scene that can only be
grasped over the course of a day.
More broadly speaking, Seurat’s pictorial engagement with the temporal dimen-
sion of visual experience is especially explicit in his 1888 series. By referencing parts of a
single tide cycle in this series, Seurat identifies one way of measuring or dividing time, by

52 seeing in series
FIGURE 34
Photograph of the semaphore of
Port-en-Bessin, c. 1908.
FIGURE 35
Chart of Semaphore Signal Code.
means of the rotation of the earth on its axis. In addition, the tides subtly evoke an even
larger sense of cosmic time and space, in which the movements and positions of the sun
and earth determine the changing levels of the tide, thereby imbuing the paintings with
a slower and even more expansive sense of spatiality and temporality. This evocation of
tidal time based on the earth’s position contrasts with Port-en-Bessin, A Sunday (see fig. 25),
which references time as structured by the seven-day calendar. Indeed, the issue of how
time was measured was a particularly pressing one not only in France but throughout
Europe and the United States during the 1880s. In 1884 an international conference in
Washington, D.C. established standard universal time, with Greenwich, England, desig-
nated as the prime meridian. It took many years, however, to implement an international
time zone system based on countries’ longitudinal distances from Greenwich, and France
was one of the last European countries to participate. In the meantime, there was a great
deal of debate in France about how time should be kept, and timekeeping there was a dis-
jointed, chaotic affair. Throughout the 1880s, a variety of ways for measuring time were
still in use, including local or sundial time, Paris mean time, and the time kept by the rail-
road companies, a heterogeneity that led one writer in 1888 to describe France as a “chro-
nometric tower of Babel.” This same writer, advocating the adoption of Paris mean time
as the standard throughout France, lamented that “the absence of a national time obscures
the notion of time itself.”54 One can imagine that the intense debates about time measure-
ment in France in the 1880s did the opposite, that is, made the notion of time itself all the
more present, thus serving as a broader context for Seurat’s evocations of different means
of dividing time in his series. And, of course, long before debates about standard universal

53 seeing in series
FIGURE 36
Georges Seurat, Le Crotoy
(Upstream), 1889. Oil on canvas,
273/4 × 311/8 in. (70.5 × 86.7 cm);
framed, 387/8 × 451/8 in. (98.7 ×
114.6 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts.
Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill
(70.183).
54
time arose, the issue of the various methods for keeping time, and the discrepancies in
how time was kept from locale to locale, had been of crucial importance to navigators and
to places such as ports. Seurat’s portscapes, then, produced during a period when interest
in time measurement was especially pronounced, are doubly connected to questions sur-
rounding the division of time and the calendar. Finally, the many references and allusions
to various kinds of time found throughout Seurat’s seascapes are, I would argue, a clear
rejoinder to the claim by some scholars that Seurat’s pictures evince a sense of timeless-
ness. Rather than exclude time from his pictures, Seurat instead cultivates a sense of the
dilation or extension of time, that is, a sense of the slower passage of time that is quite
distinct from timelessness.
Seurat’s next seascape campaign in the summer of 1889 took him to Le Crotoy, a
very small port town on the north coast of France close to the Belgian border. The stay
resulted in only two paintings, both of which he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants
the following September (figs. 36, 37). Seurat’s limited artistic output that summer has typ-
ically been attributed to the news that his companion, Madeleine Knoblock, was pregnant,
causing him to cut his coastal sojourn short and return to Paris. But in fact there is good
reason to believe his modest production that summer was planned, an accommodation
made to the unusually small venue in which the fall 1889 Salon des Indépendants was held.
seeing in series
FIGURE 37
Georges Seurat, Le Crotoy
(Downstream), 1889. Oil on canvas,
273/4 × 341/8 in. (70.5 × 86.5 cm).
Private collection.
55
Although the Salon normally allowed each artist to exhibit up to ten works—a generous
allotment that Seurat took full advantage of by showing the maximum number of works
in almost every exhibition—for some reason the Société rented a much smaller site for
their fall 1889 exhibition and was thus forced to drastically limit the number of exhibited
works. Seurat himself was on an organizing committee of the Société and personally
advocated limiting each artist to only two submissions for the 1889 exhibition.55 The small
size of Seurat’s Le Crotoy series was thus most likely due to these temporary exhibition
limitations. If so, it serves as a clear indication of the inseparable relationship between
Seurat’s production and exhibition decisions.
Despite the reduced size of the Le Crotoy series, the two paintings nevertheless con-
form to the same general logic that governed Seurat’s other seascape groupings. Indeed,
the titles given to the two pictures, Le Crotoy (Upstream) (Le Crotoy [amont]) and Le Crotoy
(Downstream) (Le Crotoy [aval]), announce that the works represent geographically com-
plementary parts of the site. As such, the Le Crotoy pair represents a continuation of his
practice of portraying the same general site from various related vantage points, although
in abbreviated form. Going further, the very fact that Seurat worked to produce supple-
mentary views even with the limited number of canvases he was able to exhibit that year
reveals the centrality of this strategy to the artist’s seascape painting practice.
seeing in series
 As in some of his previous seascapes, Seurat creates a clear juxtaposition in both Le
Crotoy pictures between a detailed rendering of the finite parts of the scene, specifically
the cluster of buildings in each image, and a highly simplified rendering of the shore, sea,
and sky. In fact, this contrast is particularly dramatic in the 1889 pair and has become, in
a sense, the subject of the paintings. While the buildings that appear in each picture were
clearly subject to careful visual analysis on the part of the artist, the shore and sea are
stripped of almost all detail. As such, Seurat emphasizes the distinction between elements
that are graspable in their entirety and those that aren’t, producing a marked contrast
between visual incident and emptiness. But, again, this contrast was also present in some
of Seurat’s previous seascape paintings, and it corresponds to two prevalent and seemingly
contradictory critical interpretations of Seurat’s landscapes as attempting to convey accu-
racy of observation on the one hand and a sense of infinite expansion on the other. As I’ve
discussed, many critics described the seascapes with such terms as vues or aspects, thereby
rooting these pictures in Seurat’s visual experience of the sites. Ernest Hoschedé, for
example, in reference to the Grandcamp and Honfleur series, wrote that Seurat’s “Vision
and his landscapes are works of refinement.” This line of interpretation is consistent with
comments such as those by Marcel Fouquier that “Seurat has a lively and subtle vision of
landscape, of the sea especially,” and Huysmans’s that Seurat’s seascapes “reveal a very per-
sonal and very accurate grasp of nature.” Similarly, another critic noted, “I saw, last year,
at the Salon des Indépendants . . . landscapes surprising in their accuracy . . . painted by
Seurat.”56 By contrast, other critics characterized Seurat’s seascapes as trying to evoke that
which evades or exceeds one’s visual grasp. For example, Paul Adam described Seurat’s
Grandcamp paintings as conveying “the sensation of visual emptiness in the expanses of
atmosphere” in which “the gaze plunges, dives in, infinitely.” Evocations of expansion and
infinitude are found repeatedly in the criticism on his seascapes, as when Gustave Kahn,
writing in 1887, exclaimed that the Honfleur seascapes evoke the “ends of the earth and
sea, one doesn’t know where!” or when Marcel Fouquier commented that one of Seurat’s
Grandcamp paintings shows “the depth of the sea, nuanced and without limits.” Both
views of Seurat’s seascapes are equally appropriate, as these works simultaneously con-
vey a visual specificity and aim to underscore and test the limits of visual perception and
representation. A few very astute critics, in fact, noted both these features of the seascape
pictures. Émile Verhaeren, for one, wrote that The Bec du Hoc (Grandcamp) and Hospice and
Lighthouse of Honeur “are simultaneously detailed and vast,” while Jules Christophe, writ-
ing on the Honfleur series, characterized the group as “six aspects, six views, giving, with
the maximum of possible intensity, the impression of the great oceanic tank, hypnotizing
and infinite.” Christophe, thus, understood that each painting represents the larger site
from a specific point of view, and that the series also evokes the limits of sight and that
which lies beyond perceptibility.57
For what would be the last seascape series that Seurat produced before he died,
the artist chose Gravelines, a town on the north coast of France located about thirty

56 seeing in series
FIGURE 38
Georges Seurat, The Channel of
Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe, 1890.
Oil on canvas, 287/8 × 361/2 in (73.3 ×
92.7 cm). Indianapolis Museum of
Art. Gift of Mrs. James W. Fesler in
memory of Daniel W. and Elizabeth
C. Marmon (45.195).
57
kilometers from the Belgian border. The four pictures in the series focus on the channel
of Gravelines that connects the harbor and the town to the English Channel and North
Sea, lined on either side by two small hamlets, called the Grand Fort Philippe, on the west
side of the channel, and the Petit Fort Philippe, on the east side (see figs. 38–41).58 The
logic that joins together these four pictures is identical to that of his previous series, with
the four images depicting overlapping views of the site from discrete vantage points. The
Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe (fig. 38) represents the view seen when standing
on Grand Fort Philippe, looking across the channel and facing inland toward the harbor,
with the landmark lighthouse in the top left corner of the painting. To paint The Channel
of Gravelines, Grand Fort Philippe (fig. 39), Seurat crossed the narrow channel to Petit Fort
Philippe and depicted more or less the exact spot that served as his vantage point in the
previous work, with the tide signal in the middle distance serving as the focal point of
the picture. The Channel of Gravelines, Direction of the Sea (fig. 40) shows both sides of the
channel and looks out toward the sea, with the lighthouse of Petit Fort Philippe visible in
the upper right part of the painting and the tide signal faintly visible on the very far left.
Just below the tide signal and much more visible in the middle ground is another kind
of navigation aid, a channel marker that indicates the depth of the water (these markers
dotted the Gravelines channel and can also be seen, but just barely so, in Petit Fort Philippe).
Staying on the Petit Fort Philippe side of the channel, Seurat shifted his viewpoint toward
seeing in series
FIGURE 39
Georges Seurat, The Channel of
Gravelines, Grand Fort Philippe,
1890. Oil on canvas, 255/8 × 317/8 in.
(65 × 81 cm). National Gallery,
London. Bought with the aid of a
grant from the Heritage Lottery
Fund, 1995 (NG6554).
58
the English Channel for The Channel of Gravelines, An Evening (Le chenal de Gravelines, un
soir) (fig. 41), which depicts the same tide signal seen in Grand Fort Philippe and Direction
of the Sea. Of all of Seurat’s seascape series, then, the Gravelines group most concisely
illustrates the key features of his seascape project, with Seurat walking from one vantage
point to another, closely observing and then painting the same objects and spaces from
related points in space. And here, too, instruments of navigation and spatial orientation
are the focus of Seurat’s interest. The lighthouse and tide signal are the central markers
around which Seurat’s movements—and, of course, those of the ships entering and exiting
the port—are oriented, and serve as the main motifs around which this pictorial series
is structured.
Seurat’s sustained attention to lighthouses and other beacons throughout his sea-
scape painting project is significant, in part, because it helps to give us a different and
richer understanding of his well-known interest in light, which I will elaborate on in
subsequent chapters. Scholars have long situated Seurat’s interest in light in relation to
color theory, specifically, the difference in the luminosity of mixtures of colored pigments
versus those of colored light. But Seurat’s interest in light should also be seen within
the context of a broader investigation into the cognitive components of vision, and into
sight as a means for us to gain knowledge about the world around us. Art historians
have also tended to foreground the artist’s treatment of natural light in their discussion
seeing in series
FIGURE 40
Georges Seurat, The Channel of
Gravelines, Direction of the Sea,
1890. Oil on canvas, 30 × 361/4 in.
(73.5 × 92.3 cm). Kröller-Müller
Museum, Otterlo.

FIGURE 41
Georges Seurat, The Channel of
Gravelines, An Evening, 1890. Oil on
canvas, 253/4 × 321/4 in. (65.4 × 81.9
cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
William A. M. Burden.
 of his seascapes. The kind of light that seemed to most engage Seurat, however, is not
atmospheric natural light and its ephemeral qualities, but the artificial illumination of
structures such as lighthouses and harbor lights (as well as semaphores, jetties, and tide
signals, which were also sometimes illuminated). These motifs not only tie the theme of
light to issues of decipherment and navigation, but they also directly evoke the issue of the
limits of vision. Indeed, the distance from which the lights of different lighthouses were
visible was basic information that was often included in even brief descriptions of them
in tourist guides, and of course in navigation manuals. The limits of visibility also played
a central role in determining the placement, size, and source of illumination of harbor
lights and lighthouses; the desire to increase the distance at which these beacons were
visible motivated many of the advances in the design of lighthouse apparatus during the
nineteenth century. In this context, the lighthouse of Gravelines had specific significance
in the history of lighthouse illumination. In the early nineteenth century, Augustin Fresnel
developed what would come to be known as the Fresnel lens, an apparatus consisting of a
combination of redesigned lenses and prisms that could produce a dramatically brighter
light than had previously been possible. The Fresnel lens constituted a breakthrough in
navigational technology not only in France but throughout the world, and the importance
of his invention was such that every lighthouse in France displayed a bust of Fresnel over
its entrance. The first lighthouse of significant size to use the Fresnel lens was the one at
Gravelines. But beyond the particular importance of the Gravelines lighthouse, Seurat’s
lighthouses are both instruments and symbols of visual orientation, tools to help one
make spatial sense of the world and to find one’s place in it. As such, they evoke both the
literal and figurative meanings of illumination.59 And these landmarks have a key orienting
function for the viewer of Seurat’s paintings as well, who uses them and the other naviga-
tional markers in the works to understand the relationships between and among the indi-
vidual pictures in a given series and to organize them, and the sites that they depict, into
a coherent whole. Given Seurat’s significant and sustained engagement across his body of
seascape paintings with the motif of lighthouses and similar structures, the Cubist artist
and writer André Lhote’s characterization of him as “one of the lighthouses that guide this
young generation” in his 1922 book on Seurat was an especially fitting one.60
I want to close this chapter by returning to a picture from the 1888 series, Port-en-
Bessin, The Bridge and the Quays (see fig. 27), a work that communicates the centrality of
epistemologically oriented visual experience to Seurat’s seascape series project through
the relatively prominent inclusion of human figures, an anomaly within Seurat’s body
of seascapes. The absence of recognizable figures in the other seascape paintings was, I
argued, intended to position Seurat as the main protagonist of these landscapes, and to
encourage the viewer to identify with his experience of the sites. But in Bridge and the
Quays, we clearly see a man and a woman in profile, each one walking alone toward the
inner harbor, both with gazes directed toward the ground. In between these two figures
stands a small child, facing us and looking at something in our direction. Although this

60 seeing in series
 is the only such figure in Seurat’s body of seascapes, the motif of the child who intently
looks out at something is also found in A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884 (Un Dimanche
à la Grande Jatte—1884) (see fig. 42), where the outward-looking child is positioned almost
at the very center of the large composition.61 What sense might we make of these pictures
of children looking directly at something or someone in the viewer’s space? At least part
of their meaning takes clearer form if one understands them, and Seurat’s body of work
more broadly, as a sustained meditation on the ways that we gradually and continually
learn to make sense of our environment. I propose that these outward-staring children are
meant to convey the basic but crucial fact that our visual perception and comprehension
of our surroundings are precisely a learned process, one that is developed and refined over
time, in infancy and childhood, but also beyond. If Seurat emptied his other seascapes
of recognizable figures to prevent our identification with them, then perhaps the child
in Bridge and the Quays is the rare figure with whom Seurat wanted us to align ourselves.
This child is Seurat’s learner, evoking the inextricable link between looking and learning,
between seeing and knowing, and reminding us of the importance of our constant sensory
and bodily interaction with our environment for making continued sense of the world
around us.

61 seeing in series
 2 Figuring Out Vision

If, in the Grande-Jatte of M. Seurat, one considers, for example, a square decimeter
covered with a uniform tone, one finds all the constituent elements on each centime-
ter of this area, in a swirling mixture of small spots. . . . These colors, isolated on the
canvas, recompose on the retina. One has therefore not a mix of colored pigment, but
a mix of colored light.
—Félix Fénéon, June 1886

The Grande Jatte is painted with a primitive naiveté and honesty. In front of it, it is of
the Gothics that one thinks.
—Émile Verhaeren, February 1887

When A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884 (Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte—1884) was exhib-
ited by Seurat in 1886 and 1887, it was understood by many critics within two seemingly
unrelated interpretive frameworks (fig. 42). A number of critics focused on the artist’s
pointillist method of paint application, that is, on the ostensibly countless small touches of
paint, the “swirling mixture of small spots,” as Félix Fénéon put it, that appeared to cover
the surface of the enormous canvas. Fénéon’s essay, published only a few weeks after the
Grande Jatte made its debut at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, was instru-
mental in situating Seurat’s technique, and the picture more broadly, in close relation to
nineteenth-century optics and color theory. In so doing, it helped to set the stage for other
contemporary and subsequent understandings of the picture as centrally engaged with
the issue of visual perception. The second, almost equally prominent strain of interpreta-
tion focused on Seurat’s supposedly stylized rendering of the figures, which many critics
explained by linking the painting to various pre-Renaissance pictorial traditions and
styles. Critics repeatedly referenced Egyptian and Gothic art, for example, and employed
terms such as “hieratic” and “primitive” in order to draw attention to what they thought
were the most salient features of Seurat’s picture.
These two interpretive positions have been kept separate from one another in sub-
DETAIL OF FIGURE 47 sequent analyses of the painting and its critical reception, and understandably so, for they
FIGURE 42
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on the
Grande Jatte—1884, 1884–86. Oil on
canvas, 813/4 × 1211/4 in. (207.5 ×
308.1 cm). The Art Institute of
Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett
Memorial Collection (1926.224).
 seem to lead to unrelated conclusions about where the meaning of the Grande Jatte lies and
about the set of concerns that motivated its production. In this chapter, I want to com-
plicate but also reconcile these two ways of understanding the painting, by articulating a
number of interests on the artist’s part that join together both of these interpretive empha-
ses and that help make fuller sense of this complex, still enigmatic picture. I will argue that
the Grande Jatte represents a crucial, exploratory work for the artist, in which he methodi-
cally pulls apart some of the key conventions and illusionistic strategies of the multifigural
tableau. An important part of this dissection entails an exposition of the model of vision
that was implicitly posited by the tableau, as well as an exploration by Seurat of how large-
scale figural painting might respond to nineteenth-century developments in the science
of vision.
Critics who privileged Seurat’s pointillist brushwork and, by extension, his engage-
ment with nineteenth-century color and optical theory, were right to highlight the
importance of theories of vision to the Grande Jatte. Nevertheless, in order to more fully
understand the significance of pointillism in this picture and the models of visual percep-
tion that are at work in it, one must, I think, keep in mind a crucial but often overlooked
fact: the pointillist paint marks are actually a scattered layer of dots that were added to a
largely completed composition during a distinct, second stage of production that began in
the fall of 1885. Seurat’s repainting of parts of the Grande Jatte is indicative, I want to stress,
of the artist’s consideration of different definitions of vision during the almost two-year
period that he worked on the picture. By positioning the painting as an exploratory and
evolving work, my interpretation goes against the prevailing tendency to treat the Grande
Jatte as a paradigmatic pointillist work that is emblematic of or able to stand in for Seurat’s
œuvre as a whole.1 Despite how difficult it can be to put aside what we think we know
about this iconic painting, it rewards being looked at closely and anew, not only in terms
of how we understand Seurat’s style but also with regard to certain aspects of its subject
matter. Doing so, and studying the painting in relation to the other works alongside of
which it was shown and that immediately preceded and followed it, will help make clear
the ways in which the Grande Jatte is a complex, evolving meditation on different concepts
of vision, on the history and definition of the classical tableau, and on various methods
and models of pictorial illusionism.
Appearing for the first time at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in May
of 1886, the Grande Jatte was clearly a work in dialogue with the Impressionists’ many
renderings of modern figures taking their leisure in suburban settings. The casual comings
and goings of figures in Impressionist images functioned as a corollary both to the ephem-
erality of optical and atmospheric effects that interested artists such as Monet and to the
artists’ seemingly rapid methods of pictorial production. Modern life, visual perception,
and modern painting were all constituted as improvisational and ever changing. But while
the general subject matter of the Grande Jatte falls within the domain of Impressionist
imagery, many other aspects of the painting, from its composition and spatial structure,

65 figuring out vision


FIGURE 43
Draft of a letter from Seurat to
Maurice Beaubourg, August 28,
1890. Musée des Lettres et
Manuscrits, Paris.
66
to Seurat’s working process and pointillist technique, down to the very title of the paint-
ing, stand in direct, even explicit, opposition to the Impressionists’ ostensible embrace of
the fleeting and the spontaneous in perception and representation. One often overlooked
characteristic of the Grande Jatte, an important part of its anti-Impressionism, is Seurat’s
inclusion of the year 1884 in its title, which is how the
artist listed it in all three of the exhibitions in which the
painting was shown and in his 1890 letter to Maurice
Beaubourg (fig. 43). It is one of the very rare instances of
Seurat indicating a year in the title of one of his paint-
ings, a detail that, I would argue, has a great deal to do
with the artist’s wish to distinguish his picture from
those of the Impressionists. By specifying a year that was
either two or three years prior to the date of exhibition,
Seurat implies that the work took at least two years to
produce, thereby imbuing his viewing and representation
of the site with a sense of extended temporality. This
drawing out of the time of production is also conveyed
by the enormous size of the canvas, which measures
about seven by ten feet, and by the seemingly painstak-
ing pointillist technique that, for many critics, was the
defining feature of Neo-Impressionist painting. The
specification of the year is thus one of many indications
that the Grande Jatte is grounded in very different models
of visual perception and artistic production than those
of Impressionism.
While some critics explicitly interpreted the
Grande Jatte as an analysis or deconstruction of vision,
including as a reaction against the Impressionist model
of vision, other critics raised the issue of visual percep-
tion more indirectly, by characterizing the picture as a
kind of compilation or inventory of the wide array of figures and their activities seen on
the island of the Grande Jatte. As such, they implicitly argued that the picture transcended
the immediacy and contingency of any single visual experience and, instead, constituted a
more extended visual accounting of the site. As Jean Ajalbert wrote, “One needs to spend
hours in front of this canvas in order to allow the eye to take in the entire synthetic effort
of the artist. . . . The subject is vast, complex. Fishermen, fisherwomen, boaters, wet nurses,
soldiers, promeneurs, little girls sitting down and arranging their bouquets, people sitting
down, dogs, babies, not to mention a marmoset.” The use of the term “synthesis” situates
the painting as a systematic compilation of the kinds of figures that populated the island,
rather than as an attempt to represent the appearance of the site at a particular moment
figuring out vision
FIGURE 44
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884), 1884. Oil on
wood, 61/8 × 97/8 in. (15.5 × 25 cm).
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
FIGURE 45
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884), c. 1884.
Oil on wood, 61/8 × 93/4 in. (15.6 ×
24.8 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, NY. Gift of A. Conger
Goodyear, 1949.
FIGURE 46
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884), c. 1884–85.
Oil on wood, 61/4 × 97/8 in. (16 × 25
cm). National Gallery, London.
Presented by Heinz Berggruen,
1995 (NG6556).
67
in time. Émile Verhaeren, in a typically insightful comment, also interpreted the Grande
Jatte as the product of Seurat’s multiple visits to the locale when he wrote, “the gestures of
the promeneurs, their groupings, their comings and goings, are essential. The entire work
presents itself as the result of numerous periodic observations.”2
In fact, the Grande Jatte was literally a synthesis or composite of Seurat’s repeated
observations of the island, accumulated over the course of many visits and recorded in
numerous preparatory images. While most of the Impressionists rejected the distinc-
tion between sketch and finished work, with the final picture constituting an ostensibly
immediate transcription of the artist’s visual experience of the motif, Seurat, by contrast,
produced a significant number of preparatory paintings and drawings for the Grande Jatte.
Among these were painted sketches of individuals or groups of figures on the Grande Jatte
that were produced on small wooden panels measuring about six by nine inches and that
were referred to by Seurat as croquetons (figs. 44–46). The term is one that he seems to have
invented, but it is also related to the common term croquis, that is, a sketch constituting the
artist’s first, quick notations of the motif.3 In the first few years of his career, Seurat some-
times exhibited these croquetons alongside his finished paintings. Their diminutive size
and sketchy appearance announced their sur le motif production, and their placement next
to his finished paintings communicated Seurat’s adherence to the distinction between an
figuring out vision
 immediate, observation-based sketch and a finished figural tableau or œuvre. Thus, while
direct observation of the motif played an important part in Seurat’s painting, evidenced
not only by his many preparatory works but also by the specificity of time and place in the
painting’s title, it is equally clear that the Grande Jatte rejects the Impressionists’ model of
visual perception as a glimpse and of painting as the hastily produced representation of
that glimpse. Instead, Seurat’s incorporation of many different viewing experiences of the
site into a single painting defines the time frame at work in the painting as much longer
than a metaphorical instant. The sense of dilated or extended temporality that is evoked by
Seurat’s multiple depictions of the same locales in his seascape series is thus condensed in
the Grande Jatte into a single painting; in other words, the painting doesn’t depict a partic-
ular Sunday, but rather an accumulation of many Sundays integrated into a single picture.
For all the differences in subject matter and format between the Grande Jatte and
Seurat’s seascape series, in fact the large painting has a good deal in common with the
works that Seurat produced of France’s coast. As with the seascapes, where the meaning
of any single picture is inextricably tied to the larger grouping, so too was the Grande
Jatte meant to be seen in the context of a small constellation of related pictures. And, as in
the seascapes series, so too are the physiology of vision, our perception of space, and the
varying means at an artist’s disposal for creating the illusion of depth in a painting central
to the significance of the Grande Jatte. These are not the issues that the Grande Jatte has
typically been associated with by art historians, who have, instead, tended to focus on the
social significance of the figures that populate the picture.4 As a way of shifting our under-
standing of the painting away from these figures’ social classes, occupations, and public
leisure-taking, I want to draw attention to a related painting that Seurat produced very
early on in the process of working on the Grande Jatte. In the second Salon of the recently
founded Société des Indépendants, held in December of 1884, Seurat exhibited a work
painted that year and titled Landscape—The Island of the Grande Jatte (Paysage—L’Île de la
Grande Jatte) (fig. 47). The 1884 Grande Jatte depicts the exact same portion of the island as
the 1886 painting, but on a smaller scale and, importantly, devoid of any figures. In effect,
the earlier work provided a kind of stage or spatial frame into which Seurat then inserted
the figures that appear in the 1886 painting. A fully finished painting of the identical sec-
tion of the Grande Jatte, but without any of the figures that have come to dominate our
understanding of the 1886 picture, seems an improbable starting point or major prepa-
ratory work for a painting whose ostensible meaning lies in the behaviors and types of
figures taking their Sunday leisure. Seurat also produced an unusually large and highly
resolved drawing of the identical part of the island, also vacated of any human figures, at
some point in 1884 or 1885 (fig. 48). I propose that these depopulated Grande Jatte pictures
be taken as an indication that Seurat’s interests lay partially elsewhere than in the socio-
economic realities of the locale and its weekend visitors. Instead, these two related works
bring to the fore considerations regarding the representation of space and depth in paint-
ing, as well as evince an interest in the conventions of constructing a composition and

68 figuring out vision

FIGURE 47
Georges Seurat, Landscape—The
Island of the Grande Jatte, 1884. Oil
on canvas, 271/2 × 333/4 in. (69.9 ×
85.7 cm). Private collection.

FIGURE 48
Georges Seurat, Landscape—The
Island of the Grande Jatte, 1884.
Conté crayon, 161/4 × 243/4 in. (42.2
× 62.8 cm). British Museum,
London.
FIGURE 49
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte —1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
in how the different parts of that composition have traditionally been made to spatially
and narratively cohere; it is these issues that I will argue constitute the conceptual core of
this painting.
Seurat’s interest in the representation of space in the Grande Jatte is manifest not
only in his depopulated renderings of the site, but also in the complex spatial structure
of the 1886 painting. One important feature of the Grande Jatte that has received little
in-depth commentary is Seurat’s use of linear perspective as the painting’s basic com-
positional armature. The left edge of the island and the line of trees along the riverbank
function as orthogonals that converge toward the center of the island as they recede in
illusionistic depth. On the right side of the picture, the cluster of tree trunks in the middle
ground work in concert with the trees along the water’s edge to help lead the viewer’s
eye back in space and toward a kind of vanishing point that is marked by a couple stroll-
ing into the distance, their backs turned to the viewer. In addition, the many figures that
populate the island are systematically, almost self-consciously, scaled according to their
imagined distance from a viewer standing in front of the painting. And, as if to underscore
that the Grande Jatte is an examination of the conventions for creating a coherent spatial
order in a flat picture, Seurat juxtaposes the life-size couple in profile in the immediate
foreground with an identical but much smaller couple in the background, turning them
90 degrees in space so that their backs are to us and placing them at the furthest imagined
distance from the viewer, just in front of the vanishing point (fig. 49).5
Linear perspective had, of course, served as a cornerstone of pictorial illusion-
ism since the Renaissance, and it continued to be an important part of the training that
students received at the École des Beaux-Arts well into the nineteenth century. Much
of Charles Blanc’s renowned Grammaire des arts du dessin, first published in 1867, which
we know was closely read by Seurat and which can be taken to reflect some of the main

70 figuring out vision

 principles and priorities of the Academic pictorial tradition, consists of advice regard-
ing the production of large, figural tableaux, and an entire chapter of the text is devoted
to a history and explanation of linear perspective. The chapter’s placement toward the
beginning of the book is, presumably, meant to position perspective as foundational for
the creation of grand figural paintings, situating it as the essential starting point for the
practices and ideas discussed in subsequent chapters.6 Seurat’s adoption of a perspectival
scheme for the Grande Jatte conforms with what I have argued was his sustained interest
in dissecting the various components of the figural tableau and in analyzing the means
at painting’s disposal for reconstituting the three-dimensionality of the external world.
As I discussed in chapter 1, the question of depth perception and its representation in
painting was central to the logic of Seurat’s seascape series. There, the viewer is given
multiple views of the site from different vantage points as the artist moved in and around
the various parts of the locale, thereby illustrating the processes by which we recon-
struct the three-dimensionality of our surroundings out of a series of two-dimensional
visual impressions. In the Grande Jatte, Seurat employs one of the most long-standing
techniques for bridging the gap between the two-dimensionality of painting and the
three-dimensionality of the external world. But linear perspective is grounded in a very
particular model of vision, one that is wholly different from the model of vision that
Seurat posited in his seascape series. While perspectival paintings were constructed for
and according to the presence of the viewer in front of the picture, this viewer is con-
ceived of as stationary and possessing only a monocular gaze. Going further, linear per-
spective was based on a kind of abstract, idealized notion of vision in which the viewer
has full access to and mastery over the self-sufficient world presented in the tableau,
thereby excluding the corporeal and physiological contingencies of actual visual percep-
tion. Accordingly, Charles Blanc in his Grammaire defines linear perspective precisely as
the alignment of sight with intellect or reason, writing: “All lines perpendicular to the
picture converge at the point of sight; all the lines parallel to the base of the picture have
their apparent perspective parallel to this base; all the horizontal lines forming with the
picture an angle of 45 degrees, converge at the point of distance. . . . Remarkable union!
The sight of our eye resembles perfectly the sight of our reason.” Elsewhere in the text,
Blanc posits linear perspective as a corrective to the contingent and fragmented nature
of visual perception as experienced by an embodied, mobile viewer: “Yet as if all nature
were subject to [man], he runs his intelligent eye over it, and each of his movements
changing his point of sight, the lines come of themselves to converge there and form
for him a spectacle always changing, always new. Perspective is, so to speak, the ideal of
visible things. . . . But this ideal . . . ceaselessly flies and escapes us. Always within reach of
the eye, we can never seize it. As man advances towards his horizon, his horizon retreats
from him, and the lines that seem to unite in the remote distance, remain eternally
separate in their eternal convergence.”7 Here, Blanc characterizes linear perspective as
a way to harmonize and unify the multiple fragmented and provisional impressions of

71 figuring out vision

FIGURE 50
Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the
Horatii, c. 1784. Oil on canvas, 130 ×
1671/4 in. (330 × 425 cm). Musée du
Louvre, Paris.
72
the external world that result from one’s movements in space, or at least the movement
of one’s eyes. The “always changing, always new” quality of one’s visual experience of
the world as taken in by an observer whose “movements change his point of sight” is
set against the perspectival construction, which constitutes an “ideal of visible things,” a
definitive and ordered view in which lines seem to converge toward a single vanishing
point on the horizon. As such, one could understand Seurat’s use of linear perspective
in the Grande Jatte as an exploration of a model of vision that was abstracted from the
physiology and corporeality of the viewer, and of a notion of painting in which the sta-
tionary, monocular viewer is offered full and unfettered access to a unified and autono-
mous tableau.
In his book, Blanc singles out several painters for their accomplished handling of
linear perspective, and one of the most recent of these was Jacques-Louis David. Blanc’s
praise of David is understandable, given that the artist’s pre-Revolutionary history paint-
ings were paradigms of the figural grandes machines that the Academy privileged, and that
David’s use of linear perspective to structure pictorial space and to organize the figures
therein was especially pronounced. Turning back to the Grande Jatte, it seems significant
that Seurat supposedly cited David’s Oath of the Horatii as an analogue to it, which he
began exactly one hundred years after David painted his Oath in 1784 (fig. 50). According
to Paul Signac, Seurat once commented in relation to his 1886 picture that “I might just as
well have painted, in a different harmony, the Horatii and the Curatii.” Seurat’s reported
statement seems to downplay the specifics of the figures and setting and, instead, to fore-
ground the Grande Jatte’s relationship to the history of grand figural painting, serving as
another indication of the importance of the conventions and traditions of the tableau to
his thinking about the Grande Jatte.8
figuring out vision
 Another statement by Seurat, this one made by the artist in writing, also contextual-
izes his large-scale figural pictures in relation to epic history painting. In one of the drafts
of his letter to Beaubourg, Seurat wrote, “I have committed myself to four large battle can-
vases, if you might allow me to speak this way,” a comment that speaks directly of an inter-
est in ambitious figural painting. Seurat only identified two of these four “battle canvases,”
using the initials B and D, which presumably stand for Baignade, Asnières and Dimanche à
la Grande Jatte—1884. In addition to these statements to Signac and Beaubourg, the enor-
mous size of the Grande Jatte canvas also suggests his desire to engage in some way with
the tradition of the grand tableau. I don’t mean to suggest that the Grande Jatte constitutes
a straightforward continuation of this pictorial tradition. Rather, I’m arguing that Seurat’s
picture was a means for him to critically reflect on it, carefully dissecting some of its fun-
damental attributes, assumptions, and expectations, and offering possible alternatives to
certain aspects of it.9
Seeing the Grande Jatte as an analysis of some the tableau’s pictorial conventions,
such as linear perspective, and as a space within which to devise alternatives to this tra-
dition, helps us make sense of the fact that there is a second visual and spatial system
at work in the picture. In addition to or in competition with the recessive perspectival
scheme, there is a strong lateral dimension to the composition that manifests itself not
only in the ten-foot horizontal expanse of the painting, but also in several other features
of the picture. For example, a majority of the figures are shown in profile either facing the
left-hand side of the work or moving toward it, with the strolling couple in the foreground
being the most prominent example; all of these figures lead the viewer’s eyes across the
width of the painting from right to left. The flowing waters of the Seine take up a signifi-
cant portion of the left-hand side of the picture and are cut off at its left edge, which draws
our attention toward but also beyond that side of the painting. An especially pointed man-
ifestation of this leftward pull, in addition to the life-size strolling couple on the right, is
the reclining man smoking a pipe in the foreground; with his leg partially cropped by the
left edge of the canvas, he is a conspicuous and meaningful exception to Seurat’s contain-
ment of all the other figures within the four edges of the painting. The permeability of the
left edge of the picture plane and the leftward pull of the composition position the Grande
Jatte as a distinct departure from the paradigm of the autonomous tableau, whole and
complete unto itself. Similarly, the fact that many of the figures are looking at something
beyond the picture’s left edge that is inaccessible to the viewer is a defiance of the tableau’s
guarantee of visual mastery and full narrative intelligibility.
In addition to Seurat’s positioning of many of the figures such that their gazes and
movements evoke a sense of lateral, rather than recessive, movement in space, his rep-
resentation of the figures that occupy the foreground also constitutes a direct challenge
to the perspectival scheme and its monocular, stationary viewer. As Meyer Schapiro first
pointed out, these figures decrease in size the closer they are to the left side of the canvas,
as if they were being viewed by someone standing at the far right side of the painting. But

73 figuring out vision

 these same figures are also depicted as if seen head-on, implying that the viewer is stand-
ing directly in front of each one of them. In short, Seurat’s representation of the figures in
the foreground posits both a stationary viewer occupying a single viewpoint and a mobile
viewer taking in different parts of the picture from successive vantage points.10 And it
is precisely in relation to the issue of the viewer’s vantage point that, I would argue, we
should understand the little girl in white who Seurat prominently placed almost at the
very center of the picture, and who seems to be looking out at the viewer. The direction of
the child’s gaze positions the viewer on the right side of the canvas, more or less in front
of the promenading couple. In so doing, the little girl and her outward gaze make explicit
and visible the ways that linear perspective posits a single, ideal vantage point, part of
Seurat’s broader pulling apart of the constitutive components of the classical tableau.11
Another part of the composition that evokes two distinct models of vision and
pictorial spectatorship—static versus mobile, singular versus multiple, complete versus
fragmentary—is the intersection of the foreground pair in profile and the couple in the far
background. The latter are placed just in front of the vanishing point in the far distance,
their backs to us as they move further into imagined depth, while the foreground couple
are looking and moving from right to left, that is, laterally across the space of the picture.
In fact, the couple in the foreground in and of themselves hint at these two models of
sight, with the two sets of eyes of the figures reduced in profile to only one visible eye for
each and the male figure wearing a monocle. In conclusion, the Grande Jatte embodies
two spatial structures, two notions of the relationship between vision and the body of the
observer, and two models of painting. On the one hand, there is a monocular, station-
ary viewer posited by the perspectival, self-contained tableau, in which a geometrically
derived model of vision abstracts sight from the body of the viewer. On the other hand,
the lateral arrangement of figures encourages a mobile viewer and binocular scansion, the
representation of the figures in the foreground positioning the viewer in multiple vantage
points, thereby defying the notion that a single point of view can offer us complete access
to the scene in front of us.
Seurat’s investigation into the strategies that artists had long relied upon to produce
the illusion of three-dimensionality, and his exploration of the relationship between these
conventions and the physical and physiological conditions of vision, becomes even more
evident when the Grande Jatte is analyzed in relation to a key text by Helmholtz on visual
perception and pictorial illusionism. Published in French in 1878, Helmholtz’s essay “On
the Relation of Optics to Painting” is, in part, a comparative analysis of our visual experi-
ences of the external world and our experiences looking at pictorial representations of the
world, primarily in relation to the perception of depth and color. I want to focus here on
Helmholtz’s analysis of depth perception and his discussion of the means at the painter’s
disposal for conveying a sense of three-dimensionality in a picture. Helmholtz begins by
elaborating on the crucial difference between our perception of a scene in the external
world and our experience of a single, flat representation of the same scene. As I discussed

74 figuring out vision

 in chapter 1, our sense of depth and spatial relations is derived from the multiple views
of the object of sight that we take in through binocular vision and the movements of our
body, head, and eyes. A painting, however, can only depict a single impression of the scene,
and is thereby severely limited in its ability to convey the sensation of solidity and depth
to the viewer. Helmholtz describes a variety of cues for depth that we can perceive with
a single, stationary eye, and that can thus be used by an artist to help create the illusion
of three-dimensionality in a flat picture, all of which Seurat employs in the Grande Jatte.
For example, Helmholtz discusses linear perspective at length in his essay as a key means
to create the impression of spatial recession for a stationary, monocular gaze. Seurat also
follows Helmholtz’s advice about the specific kinds of objects that artists should include in
their pictures to strengthen the illusion of spatial depth. “The apparent magnitude which
objects, whose actual magnitude is known, present in different parts of the picture, must
also be taken into account. Men and animals, as well as familiar trees, are useful to the
painter in this respect. In the more distant centre of the landscape they appear smaller
than in the foreground, and thus their apparent magnitude furnishes a measure of the
distance at which they are placed.”12 In other words, the inclusion of objects in the painting
whose real dimensions are familiar enables the viewer to more easily imagine fictional
distances and spatial relations between the various elements in the painted scene. The
objects that Helmholtz identifies as being especially effective in this regard—figures, trees,
and animals—are, not coincidentally, I would argue, the primary compositional compo-
nents of the Grande Jatte, as made clear in Fénéon’s description of the painting in one of
his reviews: “in imperturbably noted values, figures, trees, boats, animals are placed on
the various planes of the painting.”13 Helmholtz also discusses the importance of including
overlapping objects or figures in a picture for giving a monocular, static eye the impression
of three-dimensionality: “Nearer objects,” Helmholtz explained, “partially conceal more
distant ones, but can never themselves be concealed by the latter. . . . This gives at once
a very certain gradation of far and near.” Accordingly, in the foreground of the Grande
Jatte we see not only the couple on the right-hand side, where the male figure is carefully
placed “behind” his female companion, but also the man lying down in the left foreground,
who partially conceals the two seated figures “behind” him, among many other exam-
ples. Furthermore, Seurat depicts the figures and objects as if the sun were illuminating
them from the side, which Helmholtz identified as another depth cue that is perceptible
by a stationary, monocular eye.14 Finally, even the large size of the Grande Jatte canvas
conforms with Helmholtz’s recommendations for minimizing the discrepancy between
a two-dimensional image and three-dimensional reality. As I discussed earlier, binocular
disparity—the difference between the impressions that each eye perceives of the object
of sight—is one of the most important means by which we perceive three-dimensional-
ity. Conversely, the absence of binocular disparity is a powerful cue that one is, in fact,
looking at a flat representation rather than at a three-dimensional scene. As the distance
between the viewer and the object of sight increases, however, the disparity between the

75 figuring out vision

 impressions received by each eye decreases. Thus, the experience of looking at a painting
from a distance will be more like the experience of looking at the actual scene in the real
world than would looking at a painting from close up. It is for this reason that Helmholtz
advised artists to produce large paintings, as a strategy for lessening the gap between
looking at a representation and looking at reality. Seurat, then, systematically incorporates
Helmholtz’s many suggestions for producing the illusion of spatial depth in painting into
the Grande Jatte, part of his exploration not only of the various ways that painters have
tried to reconstitute the spatial fullness of the external world in pictures, but also of the
distinct models of vision that are posited by these different illusionistic techniques.
Seurat’s examination of the conventions of post-Renaissance illusionism also entails
an analysis of and challenge to the tableau’s ideal of full, instantaneous intelligibility. For
one, the large group of figures populating the Grande Jatte has a distinctly enumerative
quality, rendering them a collection of individual entities, rather than parts of a unified,
easily comprehensible compositional whole. Indeed, several critics described their expe-
rience looking at the painting by listing the many different types of figures that fill the
canvas, giving the sense that the picture was an accumulation of multiple, autonomous ele-
ments. “The immense canvas titled A Sunday on the Grande-Jatte in 1884,” wrote one critic,
“shows, under the green trees, the banks of the Seine crowded with an infinity of figures of
natural grandeur, seated, standing, promenading, talking, sleeping, playing the horn, [and]
fishing.” And, as already quoted, Jean Ajalbert stated directly that the picture needed to be
viewed over time (rather than, presumably, instantaneously) in order for one to properly
take in the various, distinct parts of the composition. “One needs to spend hours in front
of this canvas in order to allow the eye to take in the entire synthetic effort of the artist.”
In Jules Christophe’s lengthy feature essay on Seurat published in 1890 for the series Les
Hommes d’aujourd’hui (Men of Today), he analyzes the Grande Jatte largely by giving an
extended inventory of the picture’s numerous individual elements:

Under a blazing summer sky, in full daylight, the radiating Seine, the smart villas on
the opposite bank, the small steamboats, sails, the joyous skiffs winding their way on
the river, and, on a path, close to us, many a promeneur, many a flâneur sprawled on
the grass or idly fishing, young girls, a wet nurse, an old Dantesque grandmother in a
bonnet, a sprawled boater, smoking his pipe without refinement, whose light pants are
entirely devoured at the bottom by an implacable sun, a dark purple little dog, a red
butterfly, a young mother and her little daughter in white with a salmon-colored belt,
two Saint-cyriens [i.e., soldiers], more young girls one of whom has a bouquet, a child
with red hair and a blue dress, a couple with a maid carrying a baby, and, on the far
right, the hieratic and scandalous couple, a young elegant giving his arm to his dandy
companion who is holding a yellow, purple, and ultramarine monkey on a leash.15

For these critics, then, it was impossible to take in the picture in a metaphorical single
glance, one of the defining traits of the classical tableau. Instead, the Grande Jatte elicits a

76 figuring out vision

FIGURE 51
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
different kind of looking, one that extends in time as the viewer gradually works through
and takes account of the many, discrete parts of the picture.
In various ways, then, the Grande Jatte repudiates the notion that any single view-
ing position, or even any single painting, can offer the viewer full visual mastery over the
scene, and instead posits a notion of vision as being inherently finite and limited. Earlier I
discussed the significance of the partially cropped leg of the man on the far left of the pic-
ture, which gives the left edge of the canvas a sense of permeability and gives the impres-
sion that the canvas is a fragment of a larger whole. Seurat, in fact, does the same with the
right edge of the canvas by including two orange-brown forms about halfway and two-
thirds up the canvas, as well as a dark triangular form in its uppermost right corner, all of
which seem to represent fragments of larger objects. The middle form is likely a portion
of a parasol, but the other two shapes are impossible to identify with any certainty. It’s
difficult to understand why Seurat included these unintelligible forms in the composition,
except precisely in order to create the impression that the canvas is a fragment and to
illustrate the fundamental contingencies and limitations of sight. The same kind of chal-
lenge to our comprehension of the picture is issued by the object in front of the cluster of
tree trunks in the right middle ground, just to the left of the little girl and the two women
seated on the grass; it turns out to be a baby carriage, but extreme foreshortening has ren-
dered it almost indecipherable (fig. 51). Other deliberately unidentifiable elements within
the composition are the multiple white patches in the foreground and middle ground of
the picture that are seen, among other places, behind and to the left of the little girl in
white and near the girl running in the background, as well as in one of the preparatory
sketches for the work (see fig. 45). Again, their unintelligibility seems to be precisely the
point, for they represent nothing so much as blind spots within our comprehension of the
picture. They constitute holes or gaps in our perception, thereby making us conscious of

77 figuring out vision

FIGURE 52
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
FIGURE 53
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
the fact that there is no such thing as complete visibility and reminding us that vision can
only operate under particular conditions and always within certain boundaries.
Other barely perceptible or unintelligible elements in the composition function
similarly as tests of the limits of vision and comprehension, and make clear to the viewer
that neither is ever total or instantaneous. Robert Herbert has identified two figures in the
dense cluster of trees on the far right-hand side of the picture that are almost completely
invisible, except if one knows where to look for them or if one visually combs every single
part of the painting, inch by inch, from very close up (fig. 52). Again, it’s difficult to under-
stand why Seurat included them, except as instantiations of the limits of sight and of the
importance of taking up multiple vantage points and viewing distances to gain the fullest
comprehension of the objects of our attention. If one peers long and carefully enough at
the canvas, one may or may not be able to identify other nearly imperceptible forms, such
as a ghostlike couple in the very far background, or a woman in profile to their left (fig. 53).
These are just some of the ways that Seurat defines vision in the Grande Jatte as a funda-
mentally contingent phenomenon and induces a sense of visual and cognitive effort, even
strain, in his viewers, as we slowly work our way through and across the vast canvas.

78 figuring out vision

FIGURE 54
Georges Seurat, A Bathing Place,
Asnières, 1884. Oil on canvas, 791/8
× 1181/8 in. (201 × 300 cm). National
Gallery, London.Bought, Courtauld
Fund, 1924.
79
Seurat’s multiple challenges to the conventions of the tableau in the Grande Jatte only
fully emerge when we examine it in the context of two other, closely related paintings of his.
Earlier, I analyzed the various ways that Seurat encourages the viewer to imaginatively proj-
ect his or her gaze beyond the left edge of the canvas. In fact, what lies on the opposite bank
of the Seine from the Grande Jatte is Asnières, which Seurat depicted in his previous large-
scale composition. A Bathing Place, Asnières (Une baignade, Asnières), the first painting that
Seurat ever exhibited, was shown in the inaugural Salon des Indépendants, held in May and
June 1884 (fig. 54). It shows a series of male figures bathing in the Seine or sitting and lying
along its banks, just across the river from the Grande Jatte, which is, importantly, visible in
the upper right-hand portion of the painting. Just as the figures in the Grande Jatte look at or
move in the direction of Asnières and Courbevoie, the postures and gazes of the figures in
Bathing are directed rightward to precisely where the island of the Grande Jatte is located.
The two pictures thus depict geographically overlapping sites, and each composition mir-
rors the other, down to the male figure in each painting who faces the other side of the Seine
and whose leg is partially cropped by the picture’s edge. Perhaps to strengthen the connec-
tion between the two works, at some point in the production of Bathing, Seurat added two
figuring out vision

FIGURE 55
Georges Seurat, A Bathing Place,
Asnières (detail of fig. 54).
boats in the upper right corner (fig. 55).16 We don’t know when they were inserted into the
composition, but their effect is, in part, to draw attention to the part of Bathing that depicts
the island of the Grande Jatte. Furthermore, the boats help to convey the spatial proximity
of the two sites, since a boat with a tricolor flag and passengers appears both in Bathing and
in the Grande Jatte, as if it were transporting figures from one site to
the other, just as Seurat moved between the two sites to paint these
spatially overlapping locales.17 Lastly, Seurat’s inclusion of the year
1884 in the title of the later painting might have been an attempt to
connect Bathing and the Grande Jatte not only in place but also in
time, since it links the Grande Jatte to the year that he painted and
exhibited the earlier picture and thereby enhances the sense of con-
tinuity between the two. Like the seascape series, Bathing and the
Grande Jatte not only restage the accumulation of different points
of view that are necessary for making sense of our surroundings,
but also foreground the contingency of vision on motion and on one’s physical position in
space. As such, the pair of pictures, like his seascapes, posit vision as fundamentally deter-
mined by and limited to its operations in a particular body, negating the ideal of a single
vantage point enabling complete visibility of one’s environment.
Another painting that I would insist Seurat created as a pendant to the Grande Jatte
is The Seine at Courbevoie, which was exhibited alongside the Grande Jatte both times that
the latter was shown in Paris (fig. 56). Although the relationship between the two pic-
tures—and Seurat’s exhibition groupings more generally—have received little attention,
the meaning of the Grande Jatte is certainly enriched by seeing it in close relation to Seine
at Courbevoie, which depicts a lone woman strolling along the bank of the river. She bears
a strong resemblance to the female figures in the Grande Jatte, especially the promeneuse
in the immediate foreground, who also has a small dog scampering at her feet. The white
wall in the background of both paintings further ties the two paintings to each other and,
more specifically, creates the impression that they depict geographically contiguous sites.
Studying the Grande Jatte and Seine at Courbevoie side by side, as Seurat had exhibited
them, gives one the distinct sense that the smaller painting represents a figure who had
wandered away from the crowd depicted in the Grande Jatte and was taking in different
views of the surrounding landscape from various parts of the island. According to a lit-
tle-discussed letter written by Paul Signac, this is in fact precisely the relationship between
the sites represented in the two pictures. Signac acquired Seine at Courbevoie in late 1886
or early 1887, just a few months after it was exhibited for the second time alongside the
Grande Jatte, and the work stayed in his possession for nearly fifty years, until his death
in 1935. In 1934, he sent a letter to Daniel Catton Rich, then curator at the Art Institute of
Chicago, which had owned the Grande Jatte since 1926. In it Signac draws a diagram that
designates the vantage points taken up by Seurat when he painted the Grande Jatte, Seine
at Courbevoie, and another work entitled The Bridge of Courbevoie (Le Pont de Courbevoie)
(not exhibited until 1887), identifying the direction and location of Seurat’s three vantage

80 figuring out vision

FIGURE 56
Georges Seurat, The Seine at
Courbevoie, 1885. Oil on canvas,
317/8 × 255/8 in. (81 × 65 cm). Private
collection.
FIGURE 57
Paul Signac, diagram of Seurat’s
vantage points on the Grande
Jatte, from letter to Daniel Catton
Rich, December 29, 1934. Art
Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and
Burnham Institutional Archives,
G20292.
82
points with arrows and the letters A, B, and C (fig. 57). The diagram indicates that the
woman in Seine at Courbevoie is indeed walking on another part of the Grande Jatte, just
as Seurat’s repeated pairing of it with the 1886 Grande Jatte implied. More specifically, she
is standing at the tip of the island, that is, the area where the vanishing point is located
in the Grande Jatte and the same part of the island that is visible in the top right corner of
Bathing. The smaller painting thus functions as an important hinge between the two larger
paintings, drawing attention to and strengthening the connections between them. Seine at
Courbevoie also corporealizes the vanishing point of the Grande Jatte, in which the viewer’s
abstract, stationary, monocular gaze joins with a point in the far distance, by embodying
it, literally, in the female figure strolling along the banks of the river. That the solitary
promeneuse faces right while most of the similar-looking female figures in the Grande Jatte
face left suggests both her and the artist’s movement in space, each of them looking at or
representing the same sites and figures from different vantage points. In all of these ways,
then, the Grande Jatte, Bathing, and Seine at Courbevoie trio function similarly to Seurat’s
seascapes. All of these groupings communicate that vision is fundamentally grounded in
the physical positions and movements of the viewer. They underscore the necessity not
only of acquiring multiple impressions of one’s surroundings for making sense of the out-
side world but also, for the artist, of painting these accumulated impressions in order to
convey the depth of that world to the viewer. Lastly, by creating a trio of figure paintings,
Seurat rejects the autonomy of meaning of the individual tableau. Instead, he disperses the
meaning of his works across the group and thereby indicates that we can only fully under-
stand each picture via its relationship to others in his œuvre.
Seurat’s methodical analysis and, in some cases, his defiance of the conventions
and strategies of the tableau also very much pertain to his treatment of the figures in
figuring out vision
 the Grande Jatte, specifically, to the unconvincing integration of figure and space and his
eschewal of a basic sense of figural illusionism. Central to the definition and practice of
history painting was the use of the human body as the compositional and rhetorical unit
of the picture, its gestures and movements crucial in communicating the narrative of
the painting to the viewer. As such, the success or failure of the history painter rested in
significant part on the ability to employ the language of the body—its poses, facial expres-
sions, and movements—to carry the meaning of the work. Charles Blanc devotes an entire
chapter of his Grammaire to the representation of the body in painting, writing that “the
great painters who make the woof of their work of human figures will . . . seek expression
by the attitude, gesture, or the movements of these figures.” He then goes on to praise art-
ists such as da Vinci for “that penetration that led him to discover souls in the movements
of the body” and, a bit further on, writes that “unity in gesture is the law of the master
and the secret of nature. . . . Look at the figure of Laocoön: It suffers from head to foot—it
shudders even to the toes.” 18
By contrast, one of the most prevalent responses to the Grande Jatte when Seurat
exhibited it concerned the unnatural appearance of the fifty or so figures in the painting,
with critic after critic disparaging the stiffness and awkwardness of their poses and move-
ments. Indeed, as other scholars have pointed out, the figures in the Grande Jatte are almost
all depicted either in profile, frontally, or from behind, which has the effect of emphasizing
their two-dimensionality and thus undermining the illusion that they are living, volu-
metric figures bending and turning in real space.19 Their illusionistic implausibility was
most commonly expressed by critics by analogizing them to dolls or toy figurines of some
sort or another. “What are these stiff people, these wooden dolls? A jumble of toys from
Nuremburg” one wrote, while another complained that “the artist gives to his figures the
automatic gestures of metal soldiers moving on articulated lozenges [i.e., on a game board].”
Similarly, Émile Hennequin wrote that “we cannot appreciate his Sunday on the Grande
Jatte, which is harsh in tone and where the figures are drawn like poorly made mannequins.”
Slightly more elaborate descriptions of the supposed inertness of Seurat’s figures include the
following passage: “The figures are made from wood, naively sculpted like the little soldiers
that come to us from Germany in fir tree boxes that smell of resin, and that one maneuvers
on a board painted red, with ingenious pegs.” Likewise, another viewer wrote that “they are
a band of petrified beings, immobile, mannequins that fix the attention of the public and
make them laugh.” Yet another critic characterized Seurat’s figures as little wooden figures
and, in his discussion of the Grande Jatte in his obituary for the artist, Verhaeren made a
point of mentioning “the hieraticism of all the figures, almost made of wood.” 20
Some critics attributed the insufficient naturalism of the figures to Seurat’s poor
drawing skills. For example, one critic described the Grande Jatte as “a large composition
that reproduces a bank of the Seine where a whole world of oddly drawn promeneurs bus-
tle about,” while another rhetorically posed the following question: “Dare we ask Seurat
where he learned to draw? His Island of the Grande-Jatte makes one think that he has no

83 figuring out vision

 idea about drawing.” Yet another claimed that “it is certain that one will never make an
acceptable painting with such a complete absence of drawing.”21 The critical consensus,
then, was that Seurat had rendered his figures in an illusionistically unconvincing fashion,
failing to convey a basic sense of their lifelikeness and mobility in space, either deliberately
or due to his lack of technical skill. The repeated analogy of Seurat’s figures to dolls, mar-
ionettes, and the like is significant not only because it conveys an absence of lifelikeness,
but also because it implies their lack of interiority, their movements controlled from with-
out rather than expressive of something within. This seems particularly important in light
of the fact that the ultimate purpose of figural illusionism in narrative-based tableaux was
to make internal sentiments or ideas visible to the viewer through the external language of
the body. In the Grande Jatte, by contrast, Seurat has drained the figures of interiority and
has thus rendered their movements and gestures devoid of any rhetorical function.
My interpretive positioning of the Grande Jatte within the history of pictorial illu-
sionism and the conventions of the figural tableau takes its cue, in part, from Seurat’s con-
temporaries. Many of them also understood the inadequate naturalism of the figures in the
Grande Jatte in art historical terms. That is, Seurat’s figures, and the painting more broadly,
were frequently discussed in relation to a diverse range of pre- or early Renaissance pic-
torial traditions and imagery. After seeing the Grande Jatte, Degas, for example, is reported
to have commented to Seurat: “You have been to Florence, you have. You have seen the
Giottos.” Paul Adam, to give another example, praised Seurat’s use of “the pure line of the
primitives” in the Grande Jatte, while another critic wrote that the painting “makes one
think of a primitive Memling.” Émile Verhaeren characterized the work in almost iden-
tical terms in the passage that I quoted at the opening of this chapter: “The Grande Jatte
is painted with a primitive naiveté and honesty. In front of it, it is of the Gothics that one
thinks.” The repeated use of the term “primitive” to describe the work and the specific
references to Gothic art and to early Renaissance artists such as Memling make clear that
these critics, and many others who described the work similarly, located the meaning
of the painting in the absence of some of the illusionistic or naturalistic conventions of
post-Renaissance painting.22 Likewise, the frequent references on the part of critics to the
“hieratic” features of the Grande Jatte, which situated the painting in relation to the highly
stylized forms of ancient Egyptian writing and imagery, are similarly meant to convey the
artist’s rejection of the illusionistic conventions of the western, post-Renaissance tradition.
For example, one critic wrote of the Grande Jatte: “A fisherman, a simple calico sitting on
the grass with a hieratic posture that feigns the ibis on the obelisks. The flaneurs in their
Sunday best in the shade of the Grande Jatte take on the simplified and definitive allure of
a procession of pharaohs.” Paul Adam spoke of “the hieratic aspect of synthesized figures”
in the painting, as did Charles Vignier when he opined that “to tell the truth, the hieratism
of the figures leaves us indifferent.” A few years later, Adam again evoked Egyptian art in
relation to the Grande Jatte: “Here are figures in the pomp of a holiday, stiff and formal,
solemn under the warm foliage of summer, with the gestures and bearing that liken them

84 figuring out vision

 to Egyptians piously processing by the stelae and sarcophagi.” Émile Verhaeren also used
the term “hieratic” on more than one occasion in his various descriptions of the painting,
as when he claimed that “just as the old masters hieraticized their figures at the risk of
ending up with stiffness, Seurat synthesizes the appearances, the poses, the walks.”23 In this
passage, Verhaeren links Seurat’s picture not with Egyptian art or writing specifically, but
rather with “the old masters” more generally, further evidence that the critics’ references
to specific artists, styles, and traditions in relation to the Grande Jatte were, ultimately, a
means of communicating Seurat’s more general defiance of post-Renaissance pictorial
conventions. And, lastly, Seurat’s famous comment, reported by Gustave Kahn in 1888,
in which he claims to have taken inspiration for his work from Phidias’s representation
of figures on the Parthenon, supports my claim of the artist’s conscious abandonment of
figural naturalism in the Grande Jatte. “The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession.
I want to make modern people, in that which is essential about them, move like the people
on those friezes.”
Previous scholars have devoted a great deal of effort to identifying specific art his-
torical sources and influences for the Grande Jatte, citing everything from popular prints
to Piero della Francesca to Puvis de Chavannes.24 But, as Robert Herbert has succinctly
argued, “early Renaissance art, popular broadsides, Egyptian art, all bear some similarities
with Seurat’s painting, but do not really share one style or set of conventions. The only
trait in common is the absence of the three-dimensional renderings of the post-Renais-
sance period.” Thus, whatever resemblance exists between the Grande Jatte and these
pictorial precedents is evidence of Seurat’s interest not in engaging with particular art his-
torical sources and styles or with any individual artist’s work, but rather in systematically
analyzing and reworking some of the pictorial conventions that these artists or pictorial
traditions had relied on. In sum, it is as part of Seurat’s broader dissection and partial
dismantling of illusionistic painting in the Grande Jatte that the figures’ bodily demeanor
should be understood, rather than as a commentary on their socioeconomic relations or
on the nature of modern leisure.25
I would also interpret Seurat’s perceived failure to convincingly integrate the figures
with the surrounding space in the Grande Jatte as another facet of this deconstruction
of the essential features of the tableau. Close examination of the canvas by conservators
has revealed that Seurat made the contours of many of his figures more pronounced by
painting a distinct series of brush marks around them, the effects of which are to flatten
FIGURE 58 the figures and to separate them from the surrounding space (fig. 58).26 Earlier I discussed
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on the important but often overlooked fact that Seurat produced and exhibited a version of
the Grande Jatte —1884 (detail of
the Grande Jatte in 1884 that was devoid of any figures, indicating that Seurat conceived of
fig. 42).
figure and ground as two somewhat distinct entities. The ostensibly “primitive” appear-
ance of the 1886 picture is partially due, I would argue, to an incongruity between figure
and space that persists in the final painting, as if the figures in the Grande Jatte don’t con-
vincingly occupy and move within their surroundings. Indeed, a few critics commented

85 figuring out vision


FIGURE 59
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
FIGURE 60
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
specifically on the disjunction between the figural and landscape elements in the painting.
The critic Jean Le Fustec, for example, wrote the following about the Grande Jatte: “Let’s
take the large canvas of Seurat. It is composed of a large field of grass, a large area of water,
and a crowd of little figures. I believe that it is impossible to remain unmoved by the qual-
ities of transparency and color that characterize the first two parts. However, I share the
amusement of the public in front of the wooden characters acting as gingerbread men in
this canvas. . . . Leave them out, and you are left with the pure and simple landscape, and
you are in the presence of a serious, powerful, and moving work.” Another reviewer spoke
even more directly about the incongruity between figures and landscape in the Grande
Jatte when he wrote that “this large canvas is a phantasmagoria drowned in green and yel-
low, where the figures, like marionettes, seem automatically fastened to the scenery.”27 This
disjunction between figure and space, in combination with the other features of the work
that defy the various conventions of the tableau, suggests a deliberate refusal on the artist’s
part to let the viewer suspend his or her illusionistic disbelief. That is, the insufficiently
naturalistic qualities of the work are meant, I would argue, to prevent a straightforwardly
narrative interpretation of the picture in which the real Grande Jatte and its weekend pop-
ulation would be the referent. Instead, Seurat offers the viewer a dissection of the pictorial
conventions and models of vision that underpinned grand figural painting, and begins to
devise alternatives to certain aspects of this pictorial paradigm.
I want to conclude my analysis of the Grande Jatte by addressing the changes made
to it during a second phase of work in late 1885 and early 1886. Seurat had originally
planned to exhibit the painting in the Indépendants exhibition that took place in March
of 1885, though it is unclear whether he considered the work finished at that point. That
exhibition was cancelled, and Seurat took the painting up again beginning in the fall of
1885 to rework it in various ways, the most important change being the addition of layers
of dotlike paint marks to various parts of the composition (figs. 59, 60).28 I’ll discuss the
theory and reception of Seurat’s pointillism in more detail later in this chapter, but for
now I simply want to point out the centrality of a physiological understanding of vision
to Seurat’s pointillist technique of paint application. As contemporary writings on Neo-
Impressionism repeatedly explained, the purpose of applying colors in very small units to
the canvas was to enable “optical mixture,” or the blending of the individual dots of color
in the eye of the viewer as colored light, rather than the artist producing those mixtures
of color on the palette and applying those pigmentary mixtures to the canvas. The former
was thought to produce an effect of greater luminosity than the latter when the viewer
looked at a painting. Art historians have long debated the extent of the artists’ and critics’
understanding of the science of color vision that was invoked in relation to pointillism.29
But an incontrovertible and crucial fact is that pointillism was meant to take into account
some facet or other of the operations of the eye and, as such, was unambiguously rooted in
a physiological conception of vision. Accordingly, pointillism should be seen as a central
component of Seurat’s exploration of different models of visual perception in the Grande

86 figuring out vision


FIGURE 61
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884 (detail
of fig. 42).
Jatte, and of the ways that paintings have, historically, posited specific definitions of sight.
The fact that Seurat’s work on the Grande Jatte culminates with the addition of pointillist
dots in late 1885 and early 1886 reflects, I would argue, his growing commitment to a phys-
iological model of vision during this time. Indeed, one might even see the inclusion of the
year 1884 in the title as a subtle explanation for the multiple paradigms of vision at work
in the picture, that is, as an indication that the ideas about vision that shaped the work had
evolved during the two or so years that it took Seurat to produce the painting.
We find evidence for Seurat’s increasing interest in the physiology of vision in late
1885 and early 1886 not only in the changes he made to the Grande Jatte, but also in his
seascape painting practice. Recall that his first group of seascape pictures, produced in and
around Grandcamp in the summer of 1885, did not share the serial logic that would define
his subsequent series, all of which consisted of pictures that represented overlapping and
related parts of the site from different vantage points. Seurat’s series strategy, I argued, was
grounded in Helmholtz’s theories of how we come to make sense of and navigate our sur-
roundings. It seems that, in the summer of 1885, Seurat was either in the process of work-
ing through these theories, or perhaps had not yet encountered them. But from the late
fall of 1885 onward, his work reflects a distinctly physiological notion of vision, manifest
not only in the change to his seascape series practice, but also in the addition of pointillist
marks to the Grande Jatte. Another aspect of Seurat’s work during the second campaign
that reveals an increased interest in the specific contingencies and limits of vision is the
addition of figures in the very far background of the painting (fig. 61). The purpose of these
barely legible figures, I argued, is to make viewers conscious of their visual limitations,
testing their visual reach and reminding them of its inherent boundaries. In sum, the
Grande Jatte is a remarkably complex work that presents the viewer with multiple mod-
els of how vision works, and suggests multiple possibilities for how paintings have been
and can be constructed around these definitions of visual perception. It is Seurat’s next
large-scale figural painting, Poseuses, that is, in fact, the first work that he fully conceived
of and executed as a pointillist painting, a work that in many ways takes the physiological
grounds of vision as its central focus.
Seurat’s profoundly relational view of his body of work, and his desire to call his
viewers’ attention to this relationality, is directly expressed in Poseuses, the entire left half
of which is taken up by a depiction of the right half of the Grande Jatte, thereby identifying
the space as Seurat’s studio (fig. 62). The literal and figurative contextualization of his rep-
utation-making manifesto picture within the realm of the studio is another indication that
we should interpret the Grande Jatte, at least in part, in relation to the world of images—
both his own œuvre and those of art history—and the practices and problems surrounding
image making, rather than the real Grande Jatte and its weekend visitors. The figures
in the Grande Jatte are here analogous to the three nude models in Poseuses, whose sole
identity and function are as objects of Seurat’s visual study and pictorial representation,
in some ways akin to the still-life ensemble at the far right of the picture. In the context

87 figuring out vision

FIGURE 62
Georges Seurat, Poseuses, 1886–
88. Oil on canvas, 783/4 × 983/8 in.
(200 × 249.9 cm). The Barnes
Foundation, Philadelphia (BF811).
88
of the studio, the self-reflexive concerns that I’ve already begun to lay out in this chap-
ter—the relationship between and among the artist’s individual paintings, different models
of vision and their representation in painting, and the conventions of a multifigural tab-
leau—become even more visible in the Grande Jatte, and this set of concerns continues to
be explored by the artist in Poseuses.
If, in the Grande Jatte, Seurat posited multiple definitions of visual experience,
Poseuses marks a much more distinct commitment on his part to a physiological concep-
tion of sight, manifest most directly but certainly not exclusively in his pointillist mode of
paint application. As contemporary critics, especially those who were closest to the artist,
consistently argued, pointillism was in large part aimed at achieving the optical mixture
of colors. Minute quantities of the components of a particular color were applied to the
canvas so that they would supposedly mix in the eye of the viewer to produce a desired
figuring out vision
 resultant color, rather than being mixed as pigments on the palette and then applied to
the surface of the picture. The following description of pointillism by the critic Émile
Hennequin is typical of how the technique was discussed at the time: “Seurat, who is
thought of as the inventor of the new method, paints not by employing the colors of a
specific tone prepared on the palette, but by juxtaposing a series of small touches of pure
colors which, from several steps back, produce the desired color by means of conventional
optics.” In Fénéon’s first substantive review of the Neo-Impressionists, he characterizes
pointillism in much the same terms as Hennequin: “These colors, isolated on the canvas,
recombine on the retina: we have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments),
but a mixture of differently colored rays of light.” As Fénéon’s description makes clear,
it was believed that applying color in small dots to the canvas allowed for the blending
of these individual dabs of color in the eyes of the viewer as colored light (what’s called
“additive mixing”), rather than the individual colors being mixed as pigments (which is
“subtractive mixing”) and then applied to the canvas.30
Regardless of whether or not the Neo-Impressionist artists and the critics writing
about their work properly understood the distinctions between colored light and col-
ored pigment, the concepts of additive versus subtractive mixing, or the primary colors
of light versus those of paint, Seurat’s pointillism is undoubtedly an attempt on his part
to ground his method of paint application in the physiology of vision. Indeed, one of the
Neo-Impressionists’ key sources on the science of vision was the work of the American
physicist Ogden Rood. Rood’s 1879 book Modern Chromatics, which was published in French
in 1881, was repeatedly invoked by contemporary critics, as well as by Seurat himself, as
an important resource on optics. Rood’s book offers a quite thorough (though at points
mistaken) analysis of color vision and its application to various contexts, and his account
is clearly based on a physiological notion of vision, expressed, for example, in statements
such as: “it is evident that color is something which has no existence outside and apart
from ourselves.”31 The introduction to the book identifies the research on color vision con-
ducted by Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Thomas Young, among the most import-
ant scientists of visual perception in the nineteenth century, as the basis for Rood’s own
text, and he devotes an entire chapter to discussing their research in some detail.32 Thus, it
seems undeniable that Seurat wanted his method of painting to take account of the phys-
iology of color perception. This is also reflected in the many references to optical fatigue,
color nerves, the state of the retina, the effect of the physical movement of the observer
on his or her perception of the painting, and so on, found throughout the discourse on
Neo-Impressionism.
In addition to supposedly enabling the optical mixture of colors, another stated
advantage to pointillism was that it allowed for a much more chromatically detailed rep-
resentation of the depicted scene. The individual “points” of paint could represent not
only the local color of the object, but also the various chromatic interactions between
differently colored parts of the scene, the influence of light on the colors of these various

89 figuring out vision

 objects, and so on. Describing the chromatic nuance of pointillist paintings, Fénéon wrote:
“Instead of mixing on the palette the pastes the result of which, laid down on the canvas,
will furnish more or less the color of the object to be represented, the painter will place
on the canvas separate touches, some corresponding to the local color of the object, oth-
ers to the quality of the light that falls on it, others to the reflections cast by neighboring
bodies, others to the complementaries of surrounding colors.”33 Fénéon’s reference to the
representation of colors that were complementary to the colors of the depicted objects,
their reflections, their interactions with light, and so on, has its roots in the writings of
the renowned chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Chevreul’s research on color vision was
undertaken when he was head of the dye works of the Gobelins tapestry manufactory in
Paris, having been brought there to investigate and correct what were initially thought of
as deficiencies in the tapestry dyes. Chevreul eventually discovered that the unsatisfactory
appearance of some of the tapestries had nothing to do with the chemical composition of
the dyes and was, instead, due to the nature of color perception itself. He undertook a sys-
tematic analysis of the ways that our perception of colors is affected by other colors seen
simultaneously or successively, thereby helping to bring to light the fundamentally rela-
tional nature of color vision. In his seminal text De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs
(On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors), first published in 1839, Chevreul defines
a wide variety of different types of color relationships, among them three kinds of con-
trasts of complementary colors. The first was called simultaneous contrast, in which the
difference between two or more contiguous colors is heightened when they are perceived
simultaneously; the second was successive contrast, in which our perception is altered by
the prior perception of a color (such as when one experiences an afterimage); the third was
called mixed contrast, which combines the effects of simultaneous and successive con-
trast.34 Chevreul’s writings helped to disseminate a central aspect of nineteenth-century
research on color vision, namely, that color was a fundamentally subjective sensory
phenomenon, one that couldn’t be analyzed or understood apart from the experience of
a perceiver.
Despite the frequency with which Chevreul’s name was invoked in discussions of
Neo-Impressionism, none of the critics acknowledged a fundamental inconsistency at
the heart of their explanations of how the Neo-Impressionists supposedly incorporated
Chevreul’s theories into their work (an inconsistency that most art historians have also
failed to acknowledge). If, as Chevreul wrote, we naturally experience the effects of simul-
taneous or successive contrast in everyday visual experience of the outside world, why did
the Neo-Impressionists need to paint these effects into their works? To give an example
of simultaneous contrast, when one is looking at something red next to something blue,
we perceive the blue to be more green (the complementary of red) and the red to be more
orange (the complementary of blue). According to the discourse on Neo-Impressionism,
the painters represented these effects in their pictures by including, say, dots of green paint
amidst the blue and dots of orange amidst the red. But why did the Neo-Impressionists

90 figuring out vision

 represent the effects of simultaneous or mixed contrast if our eyes produce these effects on
their own? If we naturally perceive the blue to be greener and the red to be more orange,
then it would seem unnecessary for the Neo-Impressionists to represent these effects in
their pictures. The only satisfactory explanation for this practice is found in Helmholtz’s
“On the Relation of Optics to Painting,” which clarifies the reasoning behind this aspect
of Neo-Impressionist painting and, as such, offers further evidence of Seurat’s famil-
iarity with Helmholtz’s work. I’ve already discussed the portions of Helmholtz’s essay
that address the differences between the depth cues we perceive in everyday experience
and those that we can perceive when looking at a flat picture. Here I want to analyze the
section of Helmholtz’s text that compares our perception of colors in the external world
to those that we perceive in a painting, which Helmholtz explains, in part, by drawing
on Chevreul’s theories of complementary color contrast. According to Helmholtz, the
effects of simultaneous contrast are experienced by a viewer regardless of whether he or
she is looking at colors in a painting or in the real world. But successive contrast (and,
thus, presumably, mixed contrast as well) is partially caused by the fatigue of the eyes,
a fatigue induced by the intense perceptual conditions of strong light and deeply satu-
rated colors that one encounters in the real world, but not when looking at a picture. As
Helmholtz writes, “such bright contrasts, as are observed in strongly colored and strongly
lighted objects in nature, cannot be expected from their representation in the picture.” If
an artist wants the painted scene to create the same chromatic experience for the viewer
as the actual scene, then, Helmholtz insists, “he must paint the contrasts which they pro-
duce. . . . Subjective phenomena of the eye must be objectively introduced into the picture,
because the scale of color and of brightness is different upon the latter.”35 In other words,
artists must include the effects of successive or mixed contrast in their pictures if they
want to minimize the discrepancy between looking at a painting and looking at a scene
in the real world. Helmholtz’s text offers the most convincing explanation for the Neo-
Impressionists’ incorporation of the effects of complementary color contrast into their
pictures. Understanding Seurat’s pointillism, at least in part, through Helmholtz’s writings,
again confirms how central the physiology of sight is to his method of paint application.
It also makes clear Seurat’s interest in exploring the possibilities and limits of painting for
re-creating our visual experience of the world around us, in this case, our perception of
color. As was the case with his seascape series, Seurat’s physiologically grounded pointil-
lism is part of his larger investigation into the ways that painting can partially traverse the
gap between pictorial representation and reality, not by means of what one might consider
more conventional illusionistic techniques, but rather by devising new illusionistic strat-
egies grounded in the nineteenth-century science of vision. Whereas the seascapes do so
primarily with regard to our perception of spatiality and depth, Seurat’s pointillism does
so in relation to our perception of color; in both cases, we see Seurat working to redefine
what constitutes illusionism in art. And, by systematically breaking down and then recon-
structing our perceptual experiences of the world around us in his pictures, Seurat renders

91 figuring out vision

 perception itself visible to the viewer and makes the subjects of these pictures, at least in
part, our perceptual processes and mechanisms.36
Indeed, the relationship between the individual units of pigment and the picture
as a whole can be seen as a kind of broad restaging of the way that sensory information
is combined to form intelligible information about the outside world. That is, the rela-
tionship between the constitutive pointillist marks and the overall image makes manifest
to the viewer the process according to which nonspatial, colored sensations cohere into
recognizable forms and spaces. Just as our sense of three-dimensional spaces and objects
is built out of two-dimensional sensory information, so too do the individual, flat poin-
tillist marks in Seurat’s paintings come together to build a legible, spatially illusionistic
image.37 Along these lines, more than one critic characterized Neo-Impressionist painting
precisely as an attempt to represent pure optical data, detached from the cognitive mean-
ing that the brain makes of this data by, in part, combining it with tactile information.
Émile Hennequin, for example, wrote that “they cease to truly see because of their desire
to objectively perceive things as the eye receives them; that is to say that by destroying the
entire education of this organ [the eye], destroying the entire wealth of tactile experiences
acquired by heredity that today permits our brains to perceive the forms of things by
means of images that are more real than those furnished by the eye alone, they are trying
to depict objects as colored spots, having no other contour than the vague delimitation
that they project onto the retina.” I would supplement Hennequin’s claim by arguing that,
while the pointillist dots might indeed represent pure sensory information, the synthe-
sis of these paint marks into a legible composition parallels the synthesis by the brain of
discrete units of optical information and the memory of tactile experiences to form the
perception of legible spaces and objects. Marcel Fouquier wrote somewhat similarly about
Pissarro’s pointillist works: “From close up, his canvases resemble, insofar as they are
pointillated, a collection of variously colored nail-heads. But in pulling back, perspective
is established, the planes deepen, and . . . the impression produced is of a vast space and
an indefinite horizon.”38 In sum, pointillism was and should be understood, in part, as a
demonstration of the way that our comprehension of the outside world is constituted by
discrete, flat elements of sensory data that are combined by the brain into a perception
of the three-dimensional world around us.
I want to begin to articulate the multiple ways that Poseuses constitutes an extended
and sophisticated exposition of the physiological grounds of vision by looking closely
at the Grande Jatte reprise taking up the left half of the picture. As if to underscore the
significance both of the linear perspectival model of vision to his 1886 painting and the
issue of the pictorial representation of depth in his work more broadly, Seurat has cut
off the Grande Jatte such that its vanishing point marks the exact center of the portion of
it reproduced in Poseuses. The entire reprise is thus fully in perspective, highlighting the
importance of perspective in the Grande Jatte and setting up a juxtaposition between it
and the spatial structure of Poseuses. The deep spatial recession of the Grande Jatte draws

92 figuring out vision

 attention both to the shallow pictorial space of Poseuses (about which I’ll say more shortly)
and to the fact that the later painting is constructed in almost reverse perspective; it seems
as if the space of Poseuses opens out toward rather than recedes from the viewer, with the
intersection of the two studio walls behind the central model helping to mark the apex
of the perspectival visual pyramid. As such, viewers standing in front of Poseuses are the
object and the subject of the gaze, with their body and gaze represented by and reflected
back to them in the body and steady, outward gaze of the central model.
The notion that the central model serves as a reflection of the viewer is supported
by several other features of the painting that locate the viewer in a specific position
directly opposite her. For example, the two visible walls of the studio slope out from the
corner in the center of the picture at equal angles, indicating that the viewer is equidistant
from them (assuming that the walls form a 90 degree angle), thereby placing us directly
in front of the central model. The Grande Jatte reprise and the four framed pictures on
the other wall also locate the viewer’s line of sight and physical position quite precisely.
Looking first at the four pictures to the right of the central model’s head, the slight diver-
gence of the angles of their top and bottom edges indicates that our line of sight falls
someplace in between the two, which is also the eye level of the central poseuse. Likewise,
the incline of the shadows of the figures and trees in the bottom half of the Grande Jatte
reprise suggests that we are looking at them from above. About two-thirds up the paint-
ing, the shadows become horizontal, indicating that the viewer is seeing them head
on, which is, again, the same height as the center of the four pictures and as the central
model’s gaze. As such, multiple elements within the scene are painted as if looked at by a
viewer standing opposite the center of the painting, whose line of sight is located along
the horizontal axis of the middle of the four framed images and the horizontal shadows in
the reprise—a viewer, in other words, who mirrors the physical position and height of the
central poseuse. The notion, then, that one’s visual experience is fundamentally dependent
upon and limited by one’s place in space is communicated in quite literal terms by Seurat’s
inclusion of a figure that mirrors one’s gaze, body, and physical position in space back to
the viewer.
But even though Seurat situates the viewer of Poseuses in a definite location in front
of the picture, this placement functions very differently than in a perspectival composi-
tion, in which a single vantage point ostensibly renders the entire scene fully legible. On
the contrary, Seurat goes to significant lengths in Poseuses to prevent that kind of visual
experience and to negate that model of vision. In addition to the way that the four framed
images, the Grande Jatte reprise, and Poseuses itself identify a specific point of view for the
spectator, they also make patently manifest that one’s perception from any single vantage
point is necessarily limited in scope. Standing opposite the central model enables the
viewer to make visual sense out of the depicted scene in Poseuses, but this same vantage
point denies us visual access to the entire Grande Jatte and to the four framed images on
the other wall; the viewer is too close and positioned at the wrong angle to take in the

93 figuring out vision

 full Grande Jatte, and is too far away from the four framed pictures to be able to decipher
them. The model of vision and spectatorship that underpins linear perspective, in which a
single point of view offers the illusion of visual and narrative plenitude, is here definitively
rejected by Seurat. Instead, the artist splinters this ideal, single vantage point into at least
three distinct points of view, each of them enabling but also limiting the viewer’s under-
standing of various parts of the scene. This is yet one more way that Seurat demonstrates
the unavoidable and fundamental contingency of perception on one’s place in space,
emphasizing the ways in which vision is confined by its operations within the body of
the viewer.
Understanding this painting as an exposition of the physiological and physical
determinants of sight helps us to make sense of the unusual architectural layout of the
depicted scene, more specifically, the placement of a corner created by two walls at the
very center of the picture. I would argue that we need to understand the composition in
terms of the concept of a coin, a physical corner that closes off our view and that is meant,
more metaphorically, to evoke the visual limitations of any individual point of view and
the representational limits of any single picture. Indeed, coin was a term frequently used by
artists and critics to describe a picture that offered a partial or particular view of the scene
(Seurat himself used it in the title of one of his 1886 seascapes, Coin d’un basin, Honeur).
Accordingly, coin is defined by Larousse both as a literal angle formed by the meeting of
two lines or planes and as a specific view or side of a site or object.39 Both definitions are
key to Poseuses; the actual corner at the center of the picture alludes to the more general
principle that this picture, and every picture, only represents particular facets of a scene.
Every point of view, and every picture, is defined by its boundaries and limits.
The centering of the composition on the meeting of the two walls gives special
prominence to these architectural surfaces in a way that, I would argue, is meant to fore-
ground how different kinds of paintings relate to the walls on which they hang. That is,
Seurat offers a clear juxtaposition between the Grande Jatte reprise on one wall and the
four framed pictures on the other; the illusion of deep spatial recession in the picture on
the left requires a denial of its own surface’s flatness, as well as that of the wall behind
it, while the illegibility of the images on the right brings to the fore the flatness of these
images’ surfaces and their similarity to their architectural support. It is perhaps for this
reason that the wall on the left is rendered literally invisible by the Grande Jatte reprise,
as a way of articulating that the perspectival model of painting requires the metaphorical
invisibility of the wall on which it hangs. Conversely, the right half of Poseuses very much
highlights the structural similarity between picture and wall, a similarity made more
evident by our inability to make out the fictional scenes of the four framed pictures. It is
not as wall-denying, spatially illusionistic images that we engage with them, but rather as
three-dimensional objects with opaque surfaces, their slight protrusion into space under-
scored by the volumetric object of clothing or accessory item that hangs just to their right.
As will become clear in the next chapter, Poseuses is by no means the only figural painting

94 figuring out vision

FIGURE 63
Sandro Botticelli, detail of the
Three Graces from Allegory of
Spring, c. 1475. Tempera on panel,
80 × 1231/2 in. (203 × 314 cm). Galle-
ria degli Uffizi, Florence.
FIGURE 64
Peter Paul Rubens, The Three
Graces, c. 1630–35. Oil on panel,
867/8 × 713/4 in. (2.205 × 1.82 m).
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
95
in Seurat’s œuvre to express these sorts of self-referential reflections through the prom-
inent inclusion of paintings and other kinds of motifs within the larger picture. But the
fact that Poseuses represents the artist’s studio makes it an especially apt work in which to
explore these sorts of pictorially self-referential considerations.
The fragmentation of the single, unified point of view into three distinct vantage
points elicited by Poseuses, the Grande Jatte reprise, and the group of four framed pictures
that I spoke of earlier is reiterated by the splintering of the human body into three discrete
views of it. In showing the female body from the back, the front, and in profile, Seurat is no
doubt referencing the long-standing art historical tradition of representing multiple nude
female figures within the same composition in complementary poses and positions, seen,
for example, in countless representations of the Three Graces (figs. 63, 64). Each woman
supplements the spectator’s view of the others and thus helps to negate the limitations of
only being able to see and represent the female figure from a single vantage point. Or, as
Leo Steinberg put it in his analysis of Picasso’s persistent attempts to render multiple views
in a single figure, the paradigm of the Three Graces enabled “the harmonizing of an ideal
of omnispection with the logic of a fixed point of view.”40 Rather than working within this
pictorial paradigm, Seurat, I would insist, defies it in fundamental ways in Poseuses, expos-
ing its devices and the visual and representational limits it was meant to disguise. For one,
Seurat denies the viewer the pretense that we are looking at three different women rather
than the same woman in three different poses and positions in space. Unlike their art his-
torical predecessors, Seurat’s poseuses are not physically differentiated from one another;
they possess the exact same hair color and style—pinned up with a red barrette or comb and
bangs covering the forehead—and what seem to be identical body types and facial features.
By situating the scene in his studio, Seurat offers us no narrative pretext, however flimsy,
figuring out vision
 for interpreting these figures as a group of women; this is no trio of bathers or graces, and
it’s hard to imagine why three different models would be posing simultaneously (or nearly
simultaneously) in his studio. The only attributes that distinguish these figures from one
another are their actions, which are, more precisely, three stages of a single action, that of
a model posing for an artist. Arranging these three figures in a line across the space of the
painting, Seurat all but demands that we see them as the same figure undertaking a single
activity that unfolds from left to right. Perhaps this is why Seurat chose the word poseuses
for the title rather than the more typical modèles, as the latter term emphasizes profession
while the former draws attention to the positions and movements of the body.41
The model’s movements in space are yet one more way that she embodies and
mirrors the visual experience of the viewer, who also moves about and takes up different
viewing positions in order to see each of the three works or groups of works clearly.
And this single, mobile figure that reflects the viewer’s own mobility again reminds us
that each vantage point offers only a finite view of the object of sight, and that the
three-dimensionality of a body or object in space can only be perceived in the real world
through a multiplicity of views, which a single image from one vantage point can never
provide. Importantly, Seurat depicts these three bodies as totally discrete rather than phys-
ically linked or engaged with each other in some way, the latter being the norm in repre-
sentations of the Three Graces. In so doing, Seurat underscores the fragmentation of the
single, full figure into three distinct, flat views, rather than enabling the viewer to take in
all three figures in a single glance and thereby facilitate the imagined integration of these
views into a single, three-dimensional body. The real fullness of the female body (or any
body) cannot be reconstituted in a single canvas, at least not one that conforms to the basic
tenets of naturalism. The three figures in Poseuses thus illustrate the necessity of viewing
an object from multiple vantage points in order to cognitively construct its three-dimen-
sionality, and also suggest the inability of most paintings to satisfactorily render this full-
ness. In his seascapes, Seurat produces series of views to overcome the limitations of any
one viewing position and any single painting. In Poseuses, Seurat employs an even more
unconventional strategy for doing so, namely, defying the long-standing precept that a
painting convey a single moment in time, instead depicting the model as she undresses,
poses for the painter, and then gets dressed again.
In addition to undermining the requisite temporal unity of the tableau, Seurat
rejects other aspects of that pictorial paradigm through the conspicuous permeability of
the edges of Poseuses, also seen, though to a lesser degree, in the Grande Jatte. The most
noticeably permeable edge is the bottom one, the furniture and profusion of garments in
the immediate foreground of the picture seeming to spill into the space of the viewer and
fall around one’s feet. But in fact there are objects cut off on all four sides of the picture,
thus clearly rendering it as a fragment of a larger whole instead of a self-contained total-
ity. This sense of fragmentation in the composition was alluded to by several critics who
praised specific morceaux within the larger painting. For example, Arsène Alexandre wrote

96 figuring out vision

 that Seurat “shows us Poseuses in a painter’s studio; the color is most interesting; several
fragments of drawing, especially a woman seen from the back, impose themselves on our
attention,” while another critic wrote that “the panel directly opposite is filled with a large
canvas by Seurat. Three poseuses in a studio in which a large painting, the Grande Jatte,
previously exhibited by the painter, forms one of the sides. The nude woman in the center
and the one viewed from the back are remarkable fragments.” And a third critic, along
these same lines, wrote of Poseuses that “several parts of this canvas are of the first order
and the ensemble is most remarkable.”42
This sense of pressure on the edges of the picture is augmented by the shallowness
of the studio space, especially in comparison to the deep perspectival recession of the
Grande Jatte reprise. Indeed, there is so little spatial depth in the depicted room that it
makes little sense to speak of a foreground, middle ground, or background in the work.
This flattening of space should be understood as another facet of Seurat’s exposition of the
physiological and corporeal conditions of visual perception. As Helmholtz made clear in
his writings, information received by the retina does not register depth per se. Instead, our
sense of three-dimensionality is produced in the brain by associating flat, retinal images
with memories of previous tactile and bodily experiences. We thus come to learn to inter-
pret optical information as “signs” (as Helmholtz called them) for depth and solidity. As
such, sight and touch are two distinct but complementary kinds of sensory information
that are combined in the brain of the perceiver to make cognitive sense of the external
world. I would argue that the flattening of space in Poseuses serves as Seurat’s acknowledg-
ment that painting belongs to the strictly optical realm of perception, and that, despite the
various techniques that he develops to partially traverse the gap between flat pictures and
the fullness of the outside world, the divide between the two is fundamental. Similarly,
Seurat’s splicing of a single female figure into three distinct figures seen from the front,
the back, and the side also makes clear that depth, which belongs to the domain of touch,
is absent from optical sensation as such. And so he depicts the figure as it is registered by
sight alone, laterally spread out across a flattened visual field in a room drained of most of
its depth.
Seurat’s exploration of the distinct kinds of information provided by touch and
sight is carried out in a variety of other ways in his rendering of the studio. The profusion
of clothing and accessories scattered around the room, for example, help to demonstrate
the split between the tactile and optical domains of experience. Seeming to fall around
the feet of the spectator in front of the painting, these objects cause the viewer to shift the
orientation of his or her gaze from the flat, vertical plane of vision down to his or her own
three-dimensional body in front of the canvas; the flatness of the vertical field and the
three-dimensionality of the horizontal field of depth are thus somewhat pried apart. More
generally, the painting is structured around a basic contrast between the vertical, visu-
ally oriented objects that cover the walls of the depicted studio (the Grande Jatte and the
four framed images to its right) and the objects located on the floor and other horizontal

97 figuring out vision

 surfaces. The latter are not just any objects, but items that are worn on the
body and, thus, in and of themselves, evoke its three-dimensionality. This is
beautifully demonstrated by the stockings that the model on the right is in
the process of donning, the unworn stocking limp and flat, while the other
is stretched around her lower leg, attesting to the fullness of the body that it
encloses. The juxtaposition in Poseuses of the domains of the optical and the
tactile, the vertical and the horizontal, the two-dimensional and the three-di-
mensional, is also conveyed by the green object that hangs on the back wall
of the studio to the right of the four framed pictures (fig. 65). Although it is
difficult to identify exactly, it is almost certainly an item of female clothing
or an accessory of some sort, one of the many garments and accessories seen
lying around the studio.43 This single item has been plucked from one of the
room’s various horizontal surfaces and relocated, literally and figuratively,
into the vertical field of vision, akin to the four framed pictures and the
Grande Jatte that hang to its left. This transposition of the object from floor to
wall succinctly symbolizes Seurat’s exploration of the ways in which different
aspects of the external world elicit the engagement of particular senses, and
FIGURE 65 the way that painting might evoke and address itself to these different aspects of sensory
Georges Seurat, Poseuses (detail perception.44
of fig. 62).
By way of concluding my analysis of Poseuses, I want to return once more to the
painting’s three female figures, in order to continue to situate them, and the picture more
generally, in relation to a repertoire of related images from the history of art. Earlier, I
discussed the relevance of the pictorial tradition of the Three Graces to Seurat’s painting,
but the three figures also closely resemble some of Ingres’s most famous painted female
nudes. The central model has a good deal in common with Ingres’s The Source (fig. 66),
both with contrapposto poses, heads cocked slightly to the left, calm outward gazes that
are neither seductive nor confrontational, small waists and wider hips, among other sim-
ilarities.45 Traces of Ingres’s The Valpinçon Bather (fig. 67) can be seen in the model on the
left-hand side of Seurat’s painting; both are depicted seated and from the back, with just a
sliver of one side of their faces visible, heads tilted down and turned slightly to the right.
The white cloth around the model’s waist recalls both the white sheet of the bed on which
the Valpinçon bather sits and the cloth wrapped around her left arm. And, lastly, certain
features of the model on the right-hand side of Poseuses resemble Ingres’s Grande Odalisque
(fig. 68), such as her elongated spine, the left foot crossed over the right thigh, the protrud-
ing knee, and an extended right arm holding the left leg, in addition to both figures being
posed on a white cloth and surrounded by various accessories and decorative items.
To characterize the relationship between the figures in Poseuses and these other
images—the Three Graces, the Ingres nudes—with the term “quotation” or “influence”
doesn’t seem quite right, although Seurat was certainly an admirer of Ingres’s work.
Instead, I want to introduce the term “mediation” as a way to describe the relationship of

98 figuring out vision

FIGURE 66
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,
The Source, 1856. Oil on canvas,
641/4 × 311/2 in. (163 × 80 cm). Musée
d’Orsay, Paris.

FAR RIGHT FIGURE 67

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,
The Valpinçon Bather, 1808. Oil on
canvas, 57 × 381/2 in. (146 × 97.5
cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris.

FIGURE 68
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,
Grande Odalisque, 1814. Oil on can-
vas, 353/4 × 633/4 in. (91 × 162 cm).
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Poseuses to these other images and to expose another facet of Seurat’s exploration of the
various conditions that shape what and how we see (and how artists picture what they see).
Rather than argue that Seurat was citing, quoting, or even referencing these other images
in any kind of conventional way, I propose that these other images unavoidably inflected
Seurat’s visual experience of the world and his representations of those experiences in his
pictures. In the case of Ingres, the painter was not only a central figure in nineteenth-
century art history, broadly speaking, but was part of Seurat’s formative artistic training,
since Seurat’s teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts was a student of Ingres.46 Poseuses, thus,
suggests that the visual world, at least Seurat’s visual world, was made up not only of the

99 figuring out vision

 figures and objects that physically surrounded him but also of various kinds of images and
representations that inevitably shaped how he saw and represented his environment.
This notion of mediation helps us, I think, to understand one of the basic differ-
ences between Seurat’s seascapes and his figural paintings. In his obituary for the artist,
Verhaeren offers an illuminating description of Seurat’s artistic practice as organized
around the production of “a large canvas in winter” in the studio and series of seascapes
“in summer, to wash his eyes of the days in the studio and to translate as exactly as pos-
sible the vivid light.”47 Verhaeren’s statement should not be read simply as distinguishing
between studio and plein-air production, or between figure painting and landscape in
Seurat’s practice. Instead, one might interpret it as identifying Seurat’s studio, where he
produced his figural paintings, as the space of other pictorial representations. Accordingly,
Seurat’s “wash[ing] his eyes of the days in the studio” and “translat[ing] the vivid light as
exactly as possible” to produce his seascape series entailed not just the careful visual obser-
vation of the landscape sites, but also an attempt to exclude other images and representa-
tions from these paintings, so that he could “translate” the world around him “as exactly
as possible.” The seascapes, then, can be understood as Seurat’s investigation into whether
vision can ever be unmediated by other images. The studio, in Verhaeren’s statement and
in Poseuses, is the space where direct observation and art history intersect, where the one
is experienced through the other, and where it is impossible to fully exclude one in favor
of the other in the process of pictorial production. The referent of that picture is, then, not
just the figures and objects that occupied his visual field, but the other representations that
informed how he saw the contents of his studio. Thus, a key difference between Seurat’s
figural paintings and his landscapes is that the former are, quite explicitly, in dialogue with
the world of other images, while the latter are more directly and purely rooted in direct
observation. It is likely for this reason that, in his letter to Beaubourg, Seurat referred to
his figural paintings as grandes toiles, a phrase that directly situates them in relation to the
history of art (although, as I’ll argue in subsequent chapters, some of Seurat’s figural works
closely engage with popular as well as art historical imagery). His seascapes, however,
were described by the artist in that same letter as études, that is, studies of the observable
world around him. His figural pictures are then, in some sense, as much about the ways
that images inform how we see the world, and about the impossibility of seeing the world
except as partially filtered through other imagery, as they are an attempt to represent
figures and spaces in that world.
It is within the context of Seurat’s reflections on the relationships between and
among pictures, his own and others, that we should also understand the Grande Jatte
reprise and the four framed images in Poseuses. Just as Verhaeren identified the essential
structure of Seurat’s œuvre as consisting of large figural works and landscape pictures,
so too does Poseuses define the artist’s body of work in terms of large-scale, figure-based
paintings, represented by the Grande Jatte reprise, and smaller-scale groups of paintings,
that is, Seurat’s seascape series, represented by the four pictures hanging together on

100 figuring out vision

FIGURE 69
Installation view of Seurat’s work
at the Association pour l’Art exhibi-
tion in Antwerp, 1892. Archives et
Musée de la Littérature, Brussels.
101
the right-hand wall. Along these same lines, one might see the Grande Jatte reprise and
the four framed images as illustrating the distinct modes of looking elicited by Seurat’s
different kinds of pictures. While his large-scale figure paintings demand to be looked at,
at least in part, from a distance, the smaller size of his seascapes and Seurat’s attention to
detail and visual incident in these works require that they be viewed from a much closer
vantage point. More broadly, the prominence of these different pictures in Seurat’s rep-
resentation of his studio should be taken as an assertion of the relationality of his body of
work, that is, of the importance of the relationships between and among his pictures. As
I have already discussed, even Seurat’s individual figural paintings are not autonomous
tableaux, but rather need to be partially seen in relation to some of his other figural works,
just as the individual seascapes need to be looked at in the context of the rest of the series.
Furthermore, both types of pictures—the figural paintings and the seascapes—are under-
stood most productively and fully when analyzed in relation to the rest of the œuvre, with
regard to both the concerns that they share and the differences they manifest. The studio
in Poseuses thus serves as a metaphor for the œuvre, for a body of work constituted by sim-
ilarity and difference, by overlap and by contrast, but above all seen relationally.
The importance for Seurat of creating a coherent and connected œuvre is manifest,
among many other ways, in his treatment of the edges and frames of his paintings. And it
is to his well-known but little-understood practice of painting his frames and edges, and
to the direct connections between the edges of his pictures, his concerns regarding the
perception and representation of depth, and his sustained exploration of new methods of
pictorial illusionism, that I want to now turn. While the significance of Seurat’s painted
borders and frames has long been acknowledged by scholars, their specific meaning, and
the relationship between this aspect of his work and the other concerns that engaged him,
have been left somewhat underexamined. The exact chronology of Seurat’s practice of
figuring out vision
FIGURE 70
Georges Seurat, Study for Poseuses,
c. 1886. Oil on wood, 61/4 × 85/8 in.
(15.8 × 22 cm). Private collection.
102
showing his pictures in painted frames and of painting a visible border around the edges
of his canvases is difficult to determine with absolute precision. Seurat often added bor-
ders long after he had completed a painting, such as the one that he added in 1888 to the
Grande Jatte. Nearly all of the original painted frames of his paintings have been lost (some
exceptions include figs. 11, 30, and 36), though a rarely reproduced photograph of an 1892
exhibition in Antwerp serves as valuable documentation of several of them (fig. 69). The
fact that Seurat sometimes returned to paintings years after he had completed them in
order to add a border suggests the importance he placed both on coherence and consis-
tency within his painted œuvre and on the edges of his pictures.
The evidence seems to indicate that his first experiments with painted frames and
borders began in conjunction with his work on Poseuses. The Grande Jatte was exhibited in
a white frame (as seen in its Poseuses reprise), but Poseuses, according to a few contempo-
rary sources, was exhibited with two external frames: a pointillist frame and a white one
surrounding it.48 Likewise, the earliest works that were originally produced with painted
borders, rather than the borders having been added at a later point, are preparatory
figuring out vision
FIGURE 71
Georges Seurat, Study for Poseuses,
c. 1886. Oil on wood, 101/4 × 61/4 in.
(26 × 15.7 cm). Musée d’Orsay,
Paris.
pictures for Poseuses (figs. 70, 71). And so it seems that Poseuses marks the beginning of
Seurat’s rethinking of the edges of his pictures, which is not at all surprising for a number
of reasons, including the prominence given in the painting to different kinds of framed
objects, demarcations, and edges. Not only does Poseuses feature multiple framed pictures
(and multiple kinds of frames) on the two visible walls, but the very space of the picture is
structured around the meeting between two walls, and between the walls and the floor, all
of which create a series of spatial edges and boundaries. Furthermore, the clothing that is
scattered throughout the studio might also be understood in relation to Seurat’s thinking
about frames and borders, since the relationship between frames and their pictures was
often analogized to the one between clothing or accessories and the female body.49 In
multiple ways, then, Poseuses centrally engages with both the literal and figurative notions
of the frame and the supplement. Indeed, Poseuses not only displays a series of pictorial
and spatial markers, but it also foregrounds the relationship between things on opposite
sides of those dividers in a way that encourages us to question how a picture relates to its
edges and to that which lay beyond those edges. The clothes that seem to spill out of the

103 figuring out vision

FIGURE 72
Georges Seurat, Moored Boats
and Trees, 1890. Oil on wood,
65/16 × 913/16 in. (16 × 25 cm). The
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of
Jacqueline Matisse Monnier in
memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt,
2008 (2008–181–1).
104
picture and into our space, the imagined expansion of the Grande Jatte beyond the edges
of Poseuses, the unavoidable comparison of the figures on the Grande Jatte to those in the
studio, and of those in the Grande Jatte reprise to those in Poseuses—all of these features of
the picture are, I would argue, evidence of Seurat’s meditation on the role of frames and
boundaries, on that which they divide and demarcate, and on the relationship between
those things that lie on either side of the demarcation.
Seurat’s innovations with his frames and borders partially emerged, I would
argue, from his interest in the perception and representation of depth and from his
desire to invent new techniques of spatial illusionism. In fact, frames had long been
used by artists as tools to create an impression of spatial recession in their pictures. But
in order to lay out the unique ways that Seurat’s pictorial edges engage with these con-
cerns, I want to draw attention to a letter written by Henri Matisse in the fall of 1915 to
friend, fellow painter, and regular correspondent Charles Camoin. The letter includes
a highly illuminating discussion of Seurat’s painted borders, one that has been largely
overlooked by Seurat scholars. In the letter, Matisse describes a small painted panel by
Seurat that he had just borrowed or purchased from Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and that
is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, donated by Matisse’s grand-
daughter (fig. 72). This panel, Matisse wrote to Camoin, had “at the top and bottom a
figuring out vision
 dark blue band pointillated with violet, which serves as a frame or rather as a repous-
soir. I think this is exactly the right word. And this is the secret of the painted frames
of Seurat. This is what artists in former times would place in their foregrounds.”50
According to Matisse, Seurat’s painted border (as far as we know, this panel only had
a border, not an external painted frame) was specifically meant to function as a repous-
soir—“I think this is exactly the right word,” he insisted in his letter. Derived from the
French word repousser, which means “to push back,” repoussoir traditionally refers to an
object placed in the foreground and near the edges of a picture that serves to heighten
the illusion of three-dimensionality by seeming to throw other parts of the composition
back into fictional depth. Matisse understood Seurat’s painted border as having this
same purpose of “pushing back” the depicted scene into fictional space and thus enhanc-
ing the sense of depth in the picture. It is important to note that Matisse was on close
terms with more than one person in Seurat’s immediate circle. Not only did he work
closely with Signac early in his career, but his dealer was none other than Fénéon, the
artistic director of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune since before Matisse signed with them in
1909. On more than one occasion Fénéon lent Matisse pictures by Seurat to take home
with him, and the panel about which he wrote to Camoin in the letter quoted above was
acquired from Bernheim-Jeune. Matisse’s comments about Seurat’s painted borders,
might well have reflected information provided to him by Signac or Fénéon, or both.51
Looking more closely at Matisse’s panel, now titled Moored Boats and Trees, and
keeping in mind Matisse’s description of Seurat’s borders as analogous to “what artists in
former times would place in their foregrounds,” the trees located next to the picture’s two
vertical edges can now be seen to have much more specific meaning. Matisse’s explana-
tion of Seurat’s borders reminds us that trees placed at the sides and in the foreground of
landscape paintings were one of the most common repoussoir elements, creating an inter-
nal frame that pushed the rest of the composition back into imagined depth, helping to
obscure the edges of the canvas and to steer the viewer’s gaze into the center of the paint-
ing. One finds in Seurat’s œuvre many examples of images in which trees are employed in
precisely this way (figs. 73–75; see fig. 56), all of them attesting to Seurat’s familiarity with
this landscape painting convention and to his sustained interest in the various ways that
artists have conveyed a sense of three-dimensional space in their pictures. The painted
border on the Matisse panel repeats not only the color and shape of the trees within
the composition, but also their repoussoir function, and thus represents an attempt on
Seurat’s part to devise a new method for reconstituting a sense of depth in his paintings.
And yet, this new illusionistic device of the painted border also constitutes a dis-
avowal of the fiction of the transparency of the picture’s surface. As Clement Greenberg
put it, Seurat “was the first to take the frame into account as part of the picture and to
insist on indicating it by painting a border within the picture itself, and he was thus the
first to attack the concept of the easel painting as a window.” That is, a border on the
surface of the canvas highlights the picture’s opacity and flatness, thereby interfering

105 figuring out vision

FIGURE 73
Georges Seurat, The Bridge of
Courbevoie, 1886–87. Oil on can-
vas, 181/4 × 213/8 in. (46.4 × 55.3 cm).
Courtauld Institute Galleries,
London (P.1948.SC.394).
106
with the viewer’s ability to imagine the surface as a transparent plane through which
one views a three-dimensional scene. As such, the painted borders constitute a new
means of conveying depth at the same time that they mark Seurat’s relinquishment of
the centuries-old paradigm of a painting being like a window.52
At least some of Seurat’s contemporaries likewise understood his framing devices
as a reflection of the artist’s concerns about illusionism and as part of his investigation of
various models of painting. Gustave Kahn has provided the most in-depth primary com-
mentary on the subject in two essays that he authored in the 1920s. The first is a little-
discussed essay written in 1924 entitled “In the Time of Pointillism” that states the follow-
ing with regard to Seurat’s painted borders and frames:
figuring out vision
FIGURE 74
Georges Seurat, Grey Weather on
the Grande Jatte, c. 1887–88. Oil on
canvas, 273/4 × 34 in. (70.5 × 86.4
cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. The Walter H. and
Leonore Annenberg Collection
(2002.62.3).

FIGURE 75
Georges Seurat, Man Leaning on a
Parapet, 1879–81. Oil on wood,
65/8 × 5 in. (16.8 × 12.7 cm). Private
collection.
 When the painting was finished, it was necessary to frame it. Seurat despised the deco-
ration of the gold frame. . . . The white frame of thick stripes that he had at first adopt-
ed quickly disgusted him. It was a barrier placed around the painting, an interruption.
It did not isolate, but rather broke it, ripping in a quick blow the concord of harmonics
that continued the harmonic theme of the principal motif in the background and in
the corners. He tried to guard against this drawback by trimming the canvas with a
border that repeated in methodical touches the tones of the painting, then he painted
his frame, and yet he judged it unsatisfactory. But what could he do? In a sense, he was
detaching a part from the larger whole, he was cutting it arbitrarily. This caused him
pain, since he was in his essence profoundly logical, and the demands of art took pre-
cedence for him over all the truths of the craft. So what? A painting is a painting! But it
is also a cut of nature.53

Kahn’s explanation of Seurat’s painted frames is somewhat opaque at points, but it seems
clear that Seurat was frustrated by the way that the white frame “interrupted” his com-
positions, serving as such a substantial “barrier” that disrupted one’s visual experience of
the work. Kahn suggests that Seurat’s decision to paint his frames and add borders was
motivated by a desire to reduce the dissonance between frame and picture, an attempt to
harmonize or integrate the two more seamlessly. This interpretation accords with critic
Jules Christophe’s assertion that Seurat used “a painted frame . . . to isolate, to annihilate,
the material envelope of wood that encloses [the paintings].”54 According to Kahn and
Christophe, Seurat’s painted frames and borders were meant to diminish the presence of
the frame, to make it disappear, in a sense, in order to mitigate the disruption created by
the difference between frame and picture.
According to Kahn, this integration of the frame and the painting seems to have
had significant consequences for the very definition or model of painting that Seurat’s
work adhered to, alluded to at the end of the lengthy passage quoted above. There Kahn
posits an important opposition between the notion that “a painting is a painting” versus a
painting being “a cut of nature,” suggesting that Seurat’s frames and borders were either
the cause or the result of a shift in pictorial paradigms, a shift about which Seurat was
conflicted. It’s not clear from Kahn’s account whether the painted frames and borders
were an attempt to restore a sense of illusionism or whether they had brought about its
perceived loss, and perhaps this ambiguity is precisely the point, because Seurat’s painted
frames and borders do both. That is, by painting a border on the edges of the canvas,
Seurat emphasizes the flatness of the picture, even though the painted border was also
meant (at least according to Matisse) to create a sense of depth. In this way, depth is both
established and renounced. And so the “pain” that Kahn refers to may well have stemmed
from the fact that the painted borders and frames undermined the status of Seurat’s paint-
ing as “a cut of nature,” that is, compromised a certain kind of illusionism in the picture (a
pain that either Kahn or Seurat himself tried to counteract with the reassuring assertion

108 figuring out vision

 that “a painting is a painting,” that is, fundamentally not able to transcend its status as a
flat surface). The painted frames and borders might thus have been intended, in part, to
institute one kind of spatial illusionism, but at the expense of the invisibility of the picture
plane and the viability of the paradigm of the painting as a window onto a three-dimen-
sional world. Seurat’s integration of his frames into his pictures was yet one more way
in which he systematically challenged the essential conventions of the classical tableau,
where the frame served as a clear marker of the distinction between pictorial space and
surrounding space, between the picture and the world around it. As the space within
Seurat’s figural paintings begins to flatten out, seen in Poseuses and even more so in his
subsequent figural works, the paintings become more akin to the wall on which they hang.
The painted border, which marks the integration of the frame onto the picture surface
itself, thus becomes all the more necessary as a way of distinguishing between these two
similarly flat surfaces, the painting and the wall behind it.55
Kahn’s second extended analysis of Seurat’s borders and frames was published
four years after the first and repeats many of the same points, but expressed in somewhat
different terms. The relevant passage from his 1928 essay goes as follows:

Now, presented with the flowing atmospheric river of phenomena, the artist is com-
pelled to build a dam around a pictorial subject if he is to capture it. In practicing his
craft, the painter starts out with a canvas, square or rectangular. When he has filled
it, what becomes of the rays which his creation casts onto the world outside the pic-
ture? Above all, what becomes of the tonal relationships which a logical orchestrator
of color has placed on his canvas and which can be extended beyond the canvas? The
past and the present give the painter the simplest advice. He is to stop brutally short
by cutting off the picture edges clearly within a frame. A shifting vision is imprisoned
with hard gold lines. . . . To solve this insoluble difficulty, Seurat conceived his painted
frame, with which he surprised his colleagues as much as Mallarmé astonished the
poets when he declared that since a collection of poems is made up of unrelated pieces,
it is improper to give them the continuous appearance of a book, and that it is prefera-
ble to enclose them as unbound sheets in a box, which could be of splendid workman-
ship. Thus Seurat continued his harmonies onto the wooden border of his picture. . . .
It always seemed to him that, try as conscientiously as he might, he was still brutally
ripping an episode out of context, tearing a page of art out of life.56

In this passage, Kahn indicates that Seurat’s painted frames were an attempt to mitigate
the sense of fragmentation created by the conventional frame in order to maintain the
mobility of what he calls “shifting vision.” And, indeed, by painting his frames and add-
ing borders, Seurat somewhat obscures the boundaries of his pictures and enables the
possibility of visual “exten[sion] beyond the canvas.” In addition, it seems that Seurat was
attempting to bestow some kind of autonomy to each canvas, just as, according to Kahn,
Mallarmé left the individual pages of his poems unbound, to indicate that each page was

109 figuring out vision

 not just a piece of the larger book. Kahn also implies that the colors of Seurat’s frames
were supposedly evoked by the colors in the paintings themselves when he writes: “What
becomes of the rays which his creation casts onto the world outside the picture?” Other
critics also discussed Seurat’s frames and borders as painted in colors that were comple-
mentary to those of the painting, drawing on Chevreul’s theories of complementary color
contrast.57 According to Kahn, the complementary color relationship between Seurat’s
frames and the painting they enclosed was another way to integrate the two and to lessen
the dissonance between them. There is no question that Seurat’s frames quite radically
unsettle the traditional relationship of the autonomous easel picture to its frame, creat-
ing an uncertainty about each element’s illusionistic function versus its material reality.
Indeed, it was on the subject of Seurat’s painted frames that Fénéon issued a rare note
of negative criticism of the artist, writing the following in his first substantial discussion
of Seurat’s frames: “The advantages of the white frame are very evident. Seurat, far from
adopting the colored frame, simply notes on his white frame the reactions of neighboring
colors. If he stops [here], this is very good. But sometimes, he imagines that this frame,
which is influenced by the painting and which, until this point has remained philosoph-
ically white and abstract, surrounds the landscape in reality and, according to the logic of
this pointless hypothesis, he punctuates it [the frame] with orange or blue according to
whether the sun is behind or in front of the spectator, according, thus, to whether the
frame is in the light or in the shadow: and this frame, while remaining white, acquires . . .
an absurd reality.”58 It is difficult to ascertain the specific picture in question, since Fénéon
was referring to a landscape and no landscapes were exhibited by Seurat at the 1888 Salon
des Indépendants. Nevertheless, the basis of Fénéon’s concern is clear. It seems that,
rather than paint the frame in colors that were complementary to those of the painting,
as if the colors of the painting produced their complementary reactions on a “philosophi-
cally white” (i.e., neutral) frame, Seurat painted the frame as if the fictional sunlight in the
painted scene affected its coloring. Doing so was clearly an attempt to minimize the dis-
tinction between the fictional scene and the picture frame by treating them both as if they
were part of the same fictional reality. Fénéon disparaged Seurat’s maneuver as lending the
frame “an absurd reality,” an excess of illusionism that seemed nonsensical to the critic.59
In sum, both Kahn and Fénéon interpreted Seurat’s painted frames and borders in the
context of questions concerning pictorial illusionism and the representational capacities
and limits of different models of painting. And both figures’ accounts of Seurat’s painted
borders and frames foreground the artist’s preoccupation with the ontological status of
his borders and frames in relation to the fictional painted scene, the physical surface of the
picture, and the reality outside of the painting.60
Seurat’s concern with these issues is evident not only in the edges of his paintings
but also in his treatment of his signature, two parts of his paintings that Seurat started to
associate with one another late in his career. Seurat never consistently signed all of his

110 figuring out vision

 paintings but, prior to 1889 or 1890, when he did sign them he did so in the lower right or
left corner of the canvas. Beginning with the two seascapes from Le Crotoy, produced in
the summer of 1889, and Young Woman Powdering Herself (see figs. 36, 37, 88), which was
first exhibited in the spring of 1890, Seurat started placing his signature on the painted
border.61 The status of the signature in relation to the rest of the work seemed both unre-
solved and important enough for Seurat to make continued modifications, as he oscillated
between signing his work in the corner, on the surface of the picture but apart from
the field of representation, placing the signature within the painted border and thereby
removing it from that field while keeping it visible to the viewer, or leaving it out of the
work entirely. Seurat’s sensitivity to the relationship between his signature and the rest
of the picture is nowhere more clearly seen than in two works, The Maria, Honeur and
the cover for a novel by Victor Joze, L’Homme à femmes (The Ladies’ Man) (see figs. 13, 92).
I’ll say much more about the novel in the next chapter, but for now I want to focus on
Seurat’s diagonal placement of his name in the lower left part of the work, just as he did
in the Honfleur painting. Initially, one might interpret the diagonal signatures in these
two pictures as a lighthearted nod by Seurat to the conventions of spatial illusionism in
painting, conventions from which the artist’s signature is usually exempt. But I would
argue that something much more specific motivated Seurat’s treatment of his signature in
these two pictures. Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that these are the only two pictures
in his œuvre to include text within the space of representation; in the Honfleur picture,
it appears along the top of the white building in the background and reads “Londres &
Honfleur via Southhampton” and, in the book cover, it takes the form of the title and the
name of the author. In both images, the text is parallel to the picture plane, and it seems
that Seurat positioned his signature at an angle in order to differentiate it from the other
text in the two works. In other words, so important was it for Seurat to mark the semantic
distinction between his signature and the other kinds of text in the image itself that he
placed his signature in these two works, and only in these two works, on a diagonal.
In sum, Seurat’s signatures and his treatment of his frames and borders are, I would
argue, part of his sustained investigation into the constitutive elements of his pictures, into
the techniques that artists have employed to create and sustain pictorial illusions, and the
relationships between these illusions, the material reality of the pictures, and the outside
world. And, indeed, Seurat’s experimentation with his frames and borders closely coin-
cides with certain basic shifts in his figure paintings, with regard both to the subjects that
Seurat begins to paint and to his abandonment of a number of basic illusionistic conven-
tions. In these later figural paintings, Seurat undertakes an extended study of specific forms
of popular entertainments, and it is the close connections between this subject matter and
his interest in different kinds of visual experience that are the subject of the next chapter.

111 figuring out vision

 3 Seductive Sights

If the objects had simply been passed in review before our eyes by some foreign force
without our being able to do anything about them, probably we should never have
found our way amid such an optical phantasmagoria.
—Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, 1867

Her legs were bent, swinging, beating the air, threatening hats, leading all eyes to look
under her skirt; these thieving looks pursuing there the much hoped-for but always
fleeting slit in her embroidered pantalons. And all around her, this incessant state of
tension of the eyes drives the men crazy.
—Eugène Rodrigues, description of a chahut dance, 1892

Hanging alongside Poseuses in the 1888 Indépendants exhibition was Parade de cirque, a
painting of performers and spectators outside of a circus at an itinerant fair in Paris that
signaled an important shift in the direction that Seurat’s figural paintings would take
from then on (fig. 76). Parade marks Seurat’s first painted foray into the world of popular
Parisian entertainments and their audiences, and he ended up devoting all but one of his
subsequent figural paintings to this subject. After Parade came Chahut, an image of can-
can dancers on a stage surrounded by spectators, and Circus, which depicts a variety of
circus performers and their audience (figs. 77, 78). Circus was hanging in the Salon des
Indépendants of 1891 when Seurat suddenly died of an infection in late March of that year.
Art historians have tended to view these later images as being consistent with the artist’s
earlier representations of leisure-taking in A Bathing Place, Asnières and A Sunday on the
Grande Jatte —1884, all of them manifestations of Seurat’s interest in the subject of leisure
and entertainment. But I think it’s more productive to treat these later figural paintings as
a distinct category of works, one in which Seurat explores the world of popular entertain-
ments and, more specifically, analyzes the kinds of effects that these performances had on
their audiences. When Parade was first exhibited, it was shown alongside four drawings
by Seurat of café-concert performers and spectators, as if to make clear to viewers his
DETAIL OF FIGURE 76 interest in these kinds of spaces and experiences (see figs. 128–131). In addition to sharing
FIGURE 76
Georges Seurat, Parade de cirque,
1887–88. Oil on canvas, 391/4 × 59
in. (99.7 × 149.9 cm). The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York.
Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960
(61.101.17).
OPPOSITE FIGURE 77
Georges Seurat, Chahut, 1889–90.
Oil on canvas, 671/2 × 551/4 in.
(171.5 × 140.5 cm). Kröller-Müller
Museum, Otterlo.
114
similar subject matter, Parade, Chahut, and Circus all engage in some way with the same
types of image. In place of the art historical references of the Grande Jatte and Poseuses,
Seurat’s later figural pictures evoke the popular imagery of advertisements of various
kinds. Lastly, these three pictures have a more strained relationship to the conventions of
illusionism than his earlier figural paintings. It is in part for this reason that all three have
a somewhat parodic or dreamlike appearance. These qualities constitute the defining fea-
tures of these three pictures and of his other figural work from this period, Young Woman
Powdering Herself ( Jeune femme se poudrant) (fig. 88), but they are not characteristic of
Seurat’s previous figural paintings. As such, these pictures need to be viewed as a distinct
group, one that is in direct dialogue with his earlier figural works but that is not seam-
lessly continuous with them.
Indeed, when works such as Chahut and Circus were exhibited, they were under-
stood by some critics in terms of Seurat’s turn away from perception-based naturalism.
To give just one example, Jules Antoine wrote that “the Poseuses, with drawing that is
deliberately naive, was exhibited at the Indépendants in 1887, [and] is still a work of strug-
gle more interesting for the effort it represents than for the result obtained. Since then,
seductive sights

FIGURE 78
Georges Seurat, Circus, 1890–91.
Oil on canvas, 731/4 × 601/4 in. (185.5
× 152.5 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
116
Seurat has aimed to leave realism, which he felt was limited. He produced in this new
path two works: The Chahut and The Circus.”1 Antoine, then, not only noted a basic shift
from Seurat’s earlier works such as Poseuses to the later ones such as Chahut and Circus,
but articulated this shift as Seurat’s abandonment of what he termed “realism.” Other
critics also pointed out Seurat’s departure from naturalism in Chahut and Circus; Émile
Verhaeren wrote, “as a result of the realist reaction against romanticism, it was necessary
that reality be scrupulously undisturbed and translated in its random nature, without any
bias, without any modification. Slowly, a certain choice in the motif has been combined
with experiments in presentation. . . . Finally—for example in Chahut—since all secondary
preoccupation of detail yields before the esthetic harmony of obliques and curves, the
painting becomes simply: a result of tones and lines for which reality serves only as a pretext.” 2
(italics added). In this chapter, I want to lay out the ways in which the form and content of
these later figural pictures are intimately intertwined. More specifically, I will explore how
their fundamental antinaturalism—the absence of conventional three-dimensional space,
the caricatural or otherworldly quality of some of the figures, or the illegible spatial rela-
tionships between key elements of the compositions—is a direct commentary on the kinds
of visual experiences offered by the depicted spectacles and on the state of mind that they
induce in their audiences.
Seurat’s first painting of urban entertainments was Parade, which he chose to exhibit
alongside Poseuses, a pairing whose significance has not received sufficient scholarly
attention. Poseuses was, in many senses, one of Seurat’s most intimate paintings, repre-
senting the private, solitary space of the artist’s studio. In sharp and significant contrast
to that intimate, private world, Parade depicts the most public and anonymous of places, a
crowded outdoor urban fair. More specifically, Seurat shows us performers lined up on
a relatively shallow, elevated stage just outside the entrance to the tent of the Cirque
Corvi, which was set up in Paris’s largest annual itinerant fair. The purpose of the parade
was to lure fairgoers into purchasing a ticket for the circus performance taking place
inside; accordingly, Seurat fills the entire bottom portion of the picture with figures who
are taking in this outdoor performance or, like the woman and child at the very far right,
purchasing tickets at the window at the top of the short staircase. Both pictures, then,
foreground the act of looking, but the mode of looking depicted in Parade is a more spec-
tatorial one, in which the viewers are shown entranced by the performance onstage, so
unlike the more focused and solitary kind of visual observation that takes place in an art-
ist’s studio. The kind of looking on view in Parade is, I want to argue, directly tied to the
manner in which Seurat has represented the scene, namely, as an almost purely flat screen,
a painting out of which it is exceedingly difficult to make visual and spatial sense. It is the
confluence of flatness, unintelligibility, and spectacle in Parade that I want to underscore
as I begin my analysis of the painting.
Looking at the development of Seurat’s figural paintings over a few short years,
one notices a dramatic elimination of spatial depth, from the deeply recessive spaces of A
seductive sights
FIGURE 79 Bathing Place, Asnières and the Grande Jatte to the much more shallow space in Poseuses, to
Advertisement for the Cirque the near-absolute flatness of Parade. As I have argued, the issue of our perception of depth
Corvi.
and solidity in the real world and the process by which we cognitively construct a sense
of three-dimensionality out of two-dimensional images—be they pictures or our retinal
impressions—was one of Seurat’s central points of investigation. It seems necessary, then,
to unpack the significance of Parade at least in part in relation to the almost total absence
of three-dimensionality from the picture, its various components—the performers, the
spectators, the stage, and so on—tightly stacked in front of each other and completely
parallel to the picture plane. In comparing Parade with an advertisement for the Cirque
Corvi as well as with two roughly contemporaneous photographs of the subject, one real-
izes how faithful Seurat’s rendering is in many respects to the appearance of the actual
site, though a few crucial differences also come into view (figs. 79–81). As is especially
clear in the two photographs, the parade of the Corvi took place on a wooden stage, with
stretches of painted canvases and doors and windows to the interior of the circus tent
forming the back “wall” behind the parade performers. The box on which the central
musician in Seurat’s picture stands can also be seen in figure 80 and, just to the right of it,
a set of stairs that lead up to the ticket window and the entrance. But one significant dis-
crepancy between Parade and these other images of the Corvi is the compression of space
in Seurat’s painting. That is, Seurat has eliminated almost all perceived distance between
the central musician, who stands on the wooden platform that juts out from the main
stage, the musicians and circus performers in the middle ground, and the painted back-
drop, doors, and windows that form the background. This conspicuous flattening out of
the painted scene clearly indicates, I would insist, Seurat’s continued interest in both the
mechanisms with which we perceive depth in the outside world and the conventions for

118 seductive sights

FIGURE 80
Photograph of the exterior of
the Cirque Corvi, early twentieth
century.

FIGURE 81
Photograph of the exterior of the
Cirque Corvi, early twentieth
century.

conveying this depth in pictorial form. Lacking almost any sense of spatial recession, the
composition is instead arranged entirely laterally, isolating one of the spatial modalities of
the Grande Jatte and rendering the entire scene as an alluring but partially indecipherable
flat screen. There is a second, much more subtle kind of spatial compression that Seurat
seems to have enacted, though it’s difficult to be certain of it. Some images of the site, such
as the advertisement for the attraction as well as a drawing that Seurat exhibited in 1886
(fig. 82), seem to show a gap between the top of the spectators’ heads and the performance
taking place above them. In Parade, Seurat slightly compressed the height of the scene and
made performers and spectators overlap a bit, in order, I would suggest, to foreground

119 seductive sights

FIGURE 82
Georges Seurat, Parade, 1883–84.
Black conté crayon on lightweight,
rough-textured, off-white, laid
paper, 125/8 × 95/8 in. (32.1 × 24.4
cm). The Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C., 1939.
120
the relationship of spectator to spectacle in the work. This overlapping would be another
indication that Seurat’s interest lies not in the general theme of the fairground circus, but
more specifically in the experience of spectatorship elicited by this kind of performance.
Although Parade received little critical attention when it was exhibited, more than
one commentator expressed surprise over Seurat’s decision to paint a nocturnal scene.3
Given the Neo-Impressionists’ ostensible interest in achieving maximum luminosity in
their paintings and in re-creating the chromatic nuances of our perception of the exter-
nal world, how should we understand the significance of Seurat’s choice of palette and
subject? That is, what might account for the nearly monochromatic color scheme of the
painting and for Seurat’s decision to represent a nighttime subject, one in which the scene
is insufficiently and somewhat surreally illuminated? In my understanding, the nocturnal
setting of Parade is one facet of the broader frustration of visibility and intelligibility that
is elicited throughout the picture. Similarly, the nearly undifferentiated coloring of the
various elements in the composition further limits our ability to decipher their identity
and position in space. Indeed, the spatial relationships between the various components
in the scene are especially difficult to make sense of, in part because of the insistent,
almost unrelenting frontality of the picture, vacated of almost all foreshortening or any
orthogonals that would help create the illusion of three-dimensionality. In short, many
features of Parade elude our ability to see and comprehend them clearly, and the entire
seductive sights
 scene is infused with a distinctly hallucinatory or phantasmatic quality that is both
entrancing and confounding.
The incomprehensibility of Parade is directly tied, I want to argue, to the mode of
looking that is represented in the image and, more broadly, to a particular model of visual
experience that Seurat is exploring in his later figural works. More specifically, the partial
unintelligibility of Parade is, in part, a demonstration of the consequences of the kind of
spectatorship that is elicited by the depicted sideshow. The audience’s entranced passivity
and immobility stand in direct opposition to the epistemologically oriented kind of look-
ing that is at work in Seurat’s seascapes and, more subtly, in some of his other paintings as
well. Both the making and the viewing of the seascape series and the Bathing–Grande Jatte–
Seine at Courbevoie trio require active and sustained sensory or corporeal engagement in
order to make full sense of the objects of one’s attention. In Parade, by contrast, Seurat
illustrates a more spectatorial mode of experience, one in which the subjects are pleasur-
ably and passively consuming the performance onstage.
Once again, Helmholtz’s writings can help us understand this aspect of Seurat’s
work, as he repeatedly highlighted the distinction between passive and active modes of
looking in explaining how we make sense of our environment: “The tests we employ by
voluntary movements of the body are of the greatest importance in strengthening our
conviction of the correctness of the perceptions of our senses. And thus, as contrasted
with purely passive observations, the same sort of firmer conviction arises as is derived by
the process of experiment in scientific investigations. . . . So long as we are limited to mere
observations and of such phenomena as occur by themselves without our help, and without our
being able to make experiments so as to vary the complexity of causes, it is difficult to be
sure that we have really ascertained all the factors that may have some influence on the
result.” For Helmholtz, it is through continual interaction with the external world that we
learn to cognitively correlate changes in our perceptions with the causes for these changes,
correlations that are essential for making sense of our sensations. Our observations and
movements function, Helmholtz posits, much like scientific experiments, in which one
develops, refines, and confirms general laws based on particular experiential results. In
his writings, such as the passage cited above, Helmholtz juxtaposes an active mode of per-
ception with one in which the subject simply witnesses phenomena in the external world
rather than engaging with or influencing them in some way. And it is only the active,
engaged mode of being, Helmholtz insists, that enables us to understand and navigate the
world around us. This distinction between passive spectatorship and active visual and
mental engagement was one that he articulated repeatedly in his writings, such as in the
following remarkable passage: “It is only by voluntarily bringing our organs of sense into
various relations to the objects that we learn to be sure as to our judgments of the causes
of our sensations. This kind of experimentation begins in earliest youth and continues
all through life without interruption. If the objects had simply been passed in review
before our eyes by some foreign force without our being able to do anything about them,

121 seductive sights

 probably we should never have found our way amid such an optical phantasmagoria.”4
In the first part of this passage, Helmholtz makes clear the importance of our continual
sensory and corporeal “experimentation” with our surroundings. It is a mode of being
that, Helmholtz stresses, continues throughout our life, rather than being confined to the
period in infancy or childhood when our perceptual and cognitive capacities first develop.
Helmholtz compares this actional, engaged mode, in which we bring “our organs of sense
into various relations to the objects” around us with a passive, spectatorial one, in which
“the objects had simply been passed in review before our eyes . . . without our being able
to do anything about them.” According to Helmholtz, such an alienated, uninvolved mode
of being would render the external world an unintelligible “optical phantasmagoria” to
the perceiver.
Helmholtz’s repeated distinction between cognitively productive and unproductive
modes of looking and being sheds important light on a similar kind of juxtaposition at
work in Seurat’s œuvre. Turning back to Parade, one can’t help but consider the phrase
“optical phantasmagoria” a stunningly apt description of the painting and recognize that
the spectatorial state that Helmholtz describes is remarkably similar to what is mani-
fested by the figures in the lower part of the picture. Like Helmholtz’s passive, immobile
observer, who visually consumes various external phenomena rather than engaging with
them in some way, so too are the figures in Parade passive, motionless consumers of the
spectacle unfolding in front of them. Seurat’s depiction of the scene as a flat, optical screen
lacking any sense of solidity, recession in space, or even clear figure-ground distinctions
illustrates the results of this lack of engagement with the external world. In other words,
Parade constitutes an image of the world as an “optical phantasmagoria,” perceived by a
viewer who assumes a spectatorial relationship to his or her surroundings.5
Seurat was certainly not alone in his keen interest in analyzing the effects of such
spectacles on their audiences. In an article published in 1886 entitled “The Difficulty of
Living,” Gustave Kahn described Paris’s cafés, dancehalls, and various other nighttime
entertainments in ways that are closely analogous to Seurat’s rendering of spectacles. In
his essay, Kahn expresses a disdain for the world of public entertainments precisely on
the grounds of the mental passivity that they induce in the public: “The city, teeming with
streets and squares, places of rest, cafés, places of empty occupation, disappointing like
tobacco, vulgar music, like the repetitious return of similar effigies, and in these monoto-
nous places, hellish whites, reds, gold—the partial hypnotization of the individual relentlessly
seated and a voluntary prisoner. . . . the concert, the apotheosis of feminine ridiculousness. . . .
Everywhere else the irritating banal rhythm, the story of women mimed, sung, spoken
and respoken, sparkling with lunatic excitement or embroidered with faded exhaustion
in monotone rhymes; always the story and the décor and the rhythm of that which autom-
atizes Mr. or Mrs. Vegetating.” Kahn’s description of the world of public spectacles is, more
precisely, a condemnation of the mental stupor that they induce in their audience, in “Mr.
and Mrs. Vegetating,” who are “hypnotized” and “automatized” by these performances and

122 seductive sights

 amusements. Elsewhere in his essay, Kahn juxtaposes the passive, numbing consumption of
spectacles with acts of production and creation, specifically with artistic creation, writing
that “to live is to be alive only when creating or preparing a creation. The rest is only like
being a stone or vegetating like a plant.”6 In short, Kahn’s analysis of the urban entertain-
ments that exploded in popularity at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris and, more
specifically, his efforts to articulate the state of mind that they produce in their audiences
have much in common with Seurat’s rendering of similar kinds of spectacles in Parade, as
well as in Chahut and Circus.
Regarding Seurat’s larger body of work, then, one sees a basic opposition between
different models of vision and the experiential ends to which vision can be put. Seurat’s
seascapes, for example, manifest an epistemologically oriented notion of visual percep-
tion, in which active sensory and corporeal engagement enables one to comprehend and
navigate one’s surroundings. Not only do these pictures, individually and as a series, invite
and reward sustained, attentive looking, but Seurat’s visual, cognitive, and corporeal inter-
actions with his surroundings as he moved through and around the site demonstrate the
kind of “experimentation” that Helmholtz advocated. The same is true for Seurat’s engage-
ment with the sites depicted in the Bathing, Grande Jatte, and Seine at Courbevoie trio; the
solitary promeneuse in the latter who has wandered away from the Grande Jatte crowd to
visit other points on the same island and take in different views along the Seine reenacts
and draws attention to Seurat’s own perambulations around the site. In a different but
analogous way, Poseuses also speaks to the processes and results of close visual engagement
with one’s surroundings, since the space of the studio and the artist’s relationship to his
models are both defined by extended and careful visual observation. When all of these
works are considered in relation to his late figural paintings of entertainments, one sees
that Seurat’s painted œuvre is organized, at least in part, around the juxtaposition of pro-
ductive sensory, cognitive, and corporeal interaction with the objects and spaces around
one and a passive consumption of amusements in which vision functions to seduce or
entrance the subject.
But I would absolutely insist that Parade and Seurat’s other later figural works are
not simply condemnations of the state of mind that is elicited by these entertainments. If
Gustave Kahn, in the passage quoted above, is unambiguous in his denunciation of pop-
ular entertainments and their effect on their spectators, Seurat’s images are much more
equivocal, acknowledging in a variety of ways the appeal of these performances and of
the mental state that they evoke. In other words, Seurat seems to articulate an alternate
paradigm of visual experience to the epistemologically oriented one at work in the sea-
scapes and earlier figural paintings. In these later pictures, Seurat depicts a series of visual
phenomena or experiences that induce a kind of disorientation of one sort or another,
that aim to seduce us and to arouse our desire, and that in some way or other overwhelm
or diminish our rational capacities. Vision, in these pictures, does not help one to deci-
pher one’s surroundings and to gain knowledge about the outside world. Rather, the

123 seductive sights

FIGURE 83
Georges Seurat, Study for Parade
de cirque, 1887–88. Conté crayon
on paper, 113/4 × 93/8 in. (30 × 24
cm). Private collection.
124
performances that Seurat depicts address spectators visually in order to entrance them, to
induce the loss of their self-possession, and to bring on a kind of dazzled, even hypnotic,
state. Parade, for example, exudes an enchanting, somewhat mystifying quality, evoking
a sense of pleasure in part precisely because it eludes our ability to make full sense of it.
Indeed, one of the unifying features of the diverse range of attractions besides the Cirque
Corvi that were on view at the annual Foire au pain d’épice (Gingerbread Fair) or Foire du
Trône, as it was sometimes called, was their defiance, in one way or another, of the natural
order or of rational explanation. Magicians, fortune tellers, illusionists, grotesque and
distorted bodies—these were the sorts of entertainments inside the thousands of tents and
booths that made up this enormous fair, and it was these kinds of acts that were displayed,
or paraded, at their entrances, seducing spectators with mesmerizing sights and holding
out the promise of more to come inside.7 The sense of mystification that Parade exudes
is due not only to the multiple ways that the painting frustrates our visual comprehen-
sion, but also, more succinctly, to the figure of the central trombonist, who appears in the
costume of a magician. Nothing epitomizes the pleasure of being confounded by one’s
visual experience and the defiance of rational explanation more than a magician, and it is
this figure around whom Seurat has organized his composition and who reigns over both
the fairground audience and Seurat’s viewers. As with Parade, so too it is with Seurat’s
seductive sights
 subsequent figural works; though they offer a critique of the physical and mental passivity
that is induced in the depicted audiences, these images simultaneously acknowledge the
allure of a different mode of being in the world, in which vision functions not to ground
or inform us, but rather to enthrall us.
Going further, Seurat not only explores a different paradigm of vision, but also a
different model of painting in these late figural works, partially aligning his pictures with
the spectacles that he depicts in them. To explore this parallel, I want to return to the sub-
ject of Seurat’s painted borders and elaborate on their function and their relationship to
other facets of Seurat’s work. We’ll recall that Matisse characterized the painted border on
the panel Moored Boats and Trees that he owned as a repoussoir meant to create the illusion
of spatial recession, and he analogized it to elements that artists had traditionally placed in
the foreground of their pictures (see fig. 72). Parade includes not only a thin painted border
like Matisse’s panel, but also a tree right next to it that mimics the border’s form and color.
The Cirque Corvi did actually have a few trees in front of the outdoor stage, but Seurat’s
decision to keep one in his composition and to feature it so prominently, as well as to
make it the subject of one of the handful of preparatory drawings for the painting (fig. 83),
can productively be understood in broader terms than just fidelity to the site. The asym-
metric, organic form of the tree is markedly out of place in this scene of urban artifice,
its spindly, irregular branches reaching across and interrupting the repetitive geometric
forms that Seurat used to construct the composition. As I discussed in the last chapter,
trees placed at the sides or in the foreground of landscape pictures were one of the most
common repoussoir devices, one that Seurat himself employed in several of his pictures.
The tree in Parade, together with the painted border, can be seen as a reflection of the art-
ist’s interest both in how painting has traditionally conveyed the illusion of spatial reces-
sion and in the possibility of inventing new ways to create a sense of depth in pictures.
In Matisse’s letter to Charles Camoin on Seurat’s painted borders, he specified
that the color of the border of Moored Boats and Trees was “dark blue” and “violet,” a sur-
prisingly important detail that represents something of a shift in the meaning of Seurat’s
borders. As Gustave Kahn explained in his 1928 essay, Seurat’s frames and borders were
generally painted in colors that were more or less complementary to those in the picture.
But by 1889, and perhaps even in 1888, Seurat began painting some of his frames and
borders dark blue or gray, as seen in Parade, Young Woman Powdering Herself (see fig. 88),
Chahut, and Circus. Accordingly, several critics described the borders of Young Woman and
Chahut as “gray” or “gray-blue” when they were exhibited in early 1890, and the frames
and borders of works in subsequent exhibitions were also identified as “dark” or “violet.”8
In other words, while Seurat’s borders and frames were always darker than the paintings
they enclosed, at some point in 1888 or 1889 he decided to foreground value (i.e., light-
dark) contrast rather than or in addition to complementary color contrast. The expla-
nation given by Seurat’s contemporaries for the new emphasis on value contrast gives
us important insight into the artist’s thinking about his borders and frames and into his

125 seductive sights

 depiction of performances and spectacles in his later figural works. In his obituary for the
artist, Verhaeren makes a point of noting the shift from color complementarity to value
contrast in Seurat’s late borders and frames which, in and of itself, seems to confirm the
significance of this change. Verhaeren goes on to explain that Seurat conceptualized his
dark frames and borders in relation to the model of spectacle and spectatorship manifest
in Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany: “His first attempts push him
toward the coloration of the borders according to the law of complementaries. In places
where the canvas ends in blue, orange appears as a limit, if the end of a corner of the work
is red, then green would isolate it, and so on. It was only recently that he added contrasts
to the complementaries. He had been thinking that at Bayreuth one darkens the room in
order to present the scene endowed with light as the only center of attention. This con-
trast of great light and darkness made him adopt the dark frames while maintaining them,
as in the past, as complementaries.” According to Verhaeren, Seurat’s dark borders and
frames were meant to imitate in some way Wagner’s darkening of the auditorium during
the performances at Bayreuth, one of several key innovations in theater design that were
developed there. Henry van de Velde also directly linked Seurat’s borders to Bayreuth,
writing that they were “drawn from the rules of the Wagnerian mise en scène.”9 One of the
most widely discussed aspects of Wagner’s Festspielhaus, which opened in 1876 with the
world premiere of the Ring Cycle, was the near-complete darkening of the auditorium
for the duration of the performance; it was the first opera house in Germany, and one of
the first in Europe, to do so. Traditionally, attending the opera was as much a social event
as an artistic one, and a well-lit auditorium that allowed audience members to socialize
with and observe one another was the norm. In the belief that the social dimension of
opera-going detracted from the audience’s experience of the opera itself, the darkening
of the auditorium at Bayreuth situated the brightly illuminated stage as the sole object
of the audience’s attention. It was one of the most noted aspects of the audience’s expe-
riences at Bayreuth, and contemporary accounts almost without exception make a point
of describing its effects. As one well-known French musicologist wrote in his 1896 book
on Bayreuth: “The last call of the trumpets sounds outside and the rare late arrivals enter.
Suddenly darkness envelops the hall and there is perfect silence. . . . The eye can distin-
guish nothing at first, then it gradually becomes accustomed to the feeble light produced
by some lights near the ceiling. From this moment on, one might hear a pin drop—every-
one concentrates his thoughts and every heart beats with emotion.” Similarly, Mark Twain
described his 1891 visit to Bayreuth as follows: “All the lights were turned low, so low that
the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. . . . Not the ghost of a sound was left.
This profound and increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time. . . . Finally,
out of the darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and
from his grave the dead magician [i.e., Wagner] began to weave his spells about his disci-
ples and steep their souls in his enchantments.”10 By the 1880s, descriptions and firsthand
accounts of Bayreuth were widely available in France, including in La Revue wagnérienne,

126 seductive sights

FIGURE 84
Sunken orchestra pit in Richard
Wagner’s Festspielhaus, Bayreuth,
Germany, c. 1900. Stadtarchiv
Bayreuth.
the monthly periodical founded by Symbolist-affiliated writers and critics and published
in Paris between 1885 and 1888.11 Thus, a familiarity on Seurat’s part with the innovations
of the Bayreuth theater and the experiences of its audiences is entirely plausible. Indeed,
if Verhaeren’s and van de Velde’s reports about Seurat’s comments are true, then Seurat
would not have been the only one to compare the relationship between the darkness of the
auditorium and the highly illuminated stage at Bayreuth to dark frames enclosing bright
pictures. The renowned German music critic Eduard Hanslick attended the inaugural per-
formance of the Ring Cycle in Bayreuth in 1876, and described it, in part, as follows: “The
Wagner Theatre itself is one of the most interesting and instructive of curiosities, not for
its exterior, which is rather meager . . . but rather because of the ingenious novelties of its
interior arrangement. . . . One sees the proceedings on the stage without obstruction—and
nothing else. At the beginning of the performance the auditorium is completely darkened;
the brightly lighted stage, with neither spotlights nor footlights in evidence, appears like a
brilliantly colored picture in a dark frame.”12
As some of the contemporary accounts quoted above indicate, the darkness of the
Bayreuth auditorium was one component of what was often described as the hypnotic
or mystifying effect of the performances, said to disorient viewers and rob them of their
self-possession. Perhaps the most famous feature of Wagner’s theater was what the com-
poser called the “mystic abyss,” which was a sunken orchestra pit located between the stage
and the first row of auditorium seats (fig. 84). The submersion of the orchestra both elimi-
nated another potential visual distraction for the audience and contributed in several ways
to the bewildering effect of the performance as a whole. Not only did the invisibility of
the musicians render the audience unable to see or locate the source of the music, but the
mystic abyss was also meant to confuse spectators by making it difficult to ascertain where
precisely the seating area ended and the stage began. In fact, frustrating the viewer’s ability
to determine spatial relations was an important part of Wagner’s theater design, and the

127 seductive sights

FIGURE 85
Multiple proscenium arches in
Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus,
Bayreuth, Germany. National
Archives of the Richard-Wagner-
Foundation, Bayreuth.
128
spatial uncertainty created by the mystic abyss was enhanced by the double (or, according
to certain accounts, triple) proscenium arch, which framed the stage and the mystic abyss
in such a way as to heighten ambiguities of scale and distance (fig. 85). As Wagner himself
put it: “Between the spectators and the scene to be observed nothing is clearly visible;
there is only a ‘space,’ kept indeterminate by architectural mediation, between the two pro-
sceniums, presenting the distanced image with all the inaccessibility of a dream vision.”13 It
should be noted that the term for proscenium arch in French is cadre de scène, or “frame of
the stage,” making Seurat’s reported analogy of his pictures and their frames to the stage
and that which surrounded it at Bayreuth all the more plausible.14 A proscenium arrange-
ment similar to the one at Bayreuth was included in the design for a theater by Wagner
and Gottfried Semper that was never built. Describing to Wagner the desired impact of
this double proscenium, Semper wrote that it would induce “a complete displacement of
scale from which will follow . . . an ostensible enlargement of everything happening on the
stage.”15 All of these features of the auditorium, together with Wagner’s keen attention to
various forms of stage illusionism, led visitors to repeatedly characterize their experiences
in terms of intoxication and hypnotization via, in part, a diminishment of their capacities
to make sense of what they heard and saw. As one visitor put it, “Wagner’s opera may be
likened to an omnicolored kaleidoscope, where the same bits of painted glass incessantly
appear and disappear, yielding prominence to others that have been seen before, and
puzzling the eye of the examiner, as the Wagner orchestra puzzles, while it frequently
enchants.” Another visitor characterized his visit in similar terms and wrote, “the descrip-
tive powers of Wagner’s fantasy, the astonishing mastery of his orchestral technique, and
many music beauties, exert a magic force to which we surrender readily and gratefully.”
Thus, almost since its founding, Bayreuth was portrayed as confounding spectators’ ratio-
nal faculties in order to enthrall and mystify them, characterizations put forward by such
seductive sights
 figures as Nordau and Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century (the latter calling Wagner
“the master of hypnotic tricks”), and by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Brecht, among others, in
the twentieth century, all of them describing Bayreuth and Wagner’s operas in strikingly
similar terms.16
It is productive, I would argue, to see Seurat’s comparison of his dark borders
and frames to the darkness of the Bayreuth auditorium as indicative of his thinking not
only about the edges of his pictures, but also about particular paradigms of painting and
different kinds of visual experience more broadly. Indeed, for centuries, picture frames
had been discussed in terms of holding and directing the gaze of the viewer; Seurat had
no need to cite Wagner’s theater simply to describe this aspect of the function of frames.17
Accordingly, Seurat’s reference to Wagner should be understood as evoking a much larger
but also more specific set of issues with regard to his frames and borders. For one, given
that his dark frames enclosed paintings of performers and audiences, it seems that Seurat
was proposing a partial analogy between the effects that his paintings might have on his
viewers, the effects of the spectacles that he was depicting on their spectators, and those
of Wagner’s operas on their audiences.18 Although Wagner would no doubt have objected
to this aligning of his operas with these popular entertainments, both kinds of perfor-
mances were commonly discussed as inducing a sense of disorientation and hypnotization.
Furthermore, both the darkening of Wagner’s theater and Seurat’s frames and borders
were aimed, in part, at creating spatial illusions. Thus, Seurat perhaps saw his framing
devices—the painted frame or the interior painted border that it encloses—as analogous
to the double proscenium at Bayreuth, which was also intended to have a repoussoir effect
and create a sense of spatial recession.19 In his essay titled “Bayreuth,” Wagner described
the intended purpose of the proscenium as creating “the singular illusion of an apparent
throwing back of the scene itself, making the spectator imagine that it is quite far away,
though he still beholds it in all the clearness of its actual proximity.” In both the Bayreuth
theater and in Parade, spatial ambiguities of scale, proximity, and distance reign, under-
mining our ability to make cognitive sense of what our senses perceive. For Helmholtz,
phantasmagoria were those sensory experiences to which we are unable to ascribe specific
external causes or sources. It is thus no coincidence that performances of Wagner’s operas
were also characterized as phantasmagorical, most famously by Adorno, precisely because
of the concealment of the means by which the various sounds, sights, and illusions were
produced.20 Vision, here, is not a means of gathering knowledge about the exterior world,
of deciphering one’s surroundings and one’s place in them, but, instead, is a mechanism
for becoming entranced by and disoriented within this world, pleasurably taking in the
“optical phantasmagoria” around one. As one commentator described itinerant fair amuse-
ments in Hugues Le Roux’s major 1889 book on circus and fairground performances (a
passage that appears just one page after an illustration of the parade of the Cirque Corvi,
no less): “It is only in mystery that our pleasure lies. . . . These phantasmagorias give us
pleasure like all phenomena that seem to defy the basic order of the universe.”21

129 seductive sights

FIGURE 86
Georges Seurat, Sketch of the
Entrance to the Cirque Corvi, 1887.
Conté crayon on paper, 41/2 × 75/8
in. (11.5 × 19.5 cm). Location
unknown.

FIGURE 87
Photograph of La Goulue’s fair-
ground booth at the Foire du Trône
with works by Toulouse-Lautrec,
published in Le Figaro illustré, no.
145 (April 1902). Département des
Imprimés, Bibliothèque nationale
de France (fol. Lc13 9ter, 13, 1902).

But where Parade and most of Seurat’s other late figural paintings differ in crucial
respects from the entertainments depicted therein and from Wagner’s performances is
in the paintings’ self-reflexivity, which functions, in part, to elicit a much more cogni-
tively engaged, self-conscious mode of looking from Seurat’s viewers. Indeed, multiple
aspects of Parade that have been little discussed speak directly to the nature and functions
of pictorial illusionism, revealing a self-referentiality to the work that merits careful
elaboration. To begin with, the entire left half of the background of Parade consists of a

130 seductive sights

 depiction of a painted canvas, one of several sections of canvas cloth that, along with min-
imal wooden supports, constituted the material framework of the performance area of the
parade. As such, half of Parade is a painting of a painting, indeed, a painting of a painted
canvas stretched between wooden supports, much like an easel painting on a stretcher.
This merger of the pictorial surface with its represented subject is one that I would insist
Seurat was acutely conscious of, though it has been generally overlooked in the previous
scholarship on the painting.22 By contrast, in one of the very first written accounts of
Parade, Gustave Kahn makes specific reference to the painted canvas in the background
of Seurat’s picture. Indeed, it was Kahn who first identified the subject of Parade as the
Cirque Corvi, describing the picture, in part, as “three sickly figures blow[ing] into brass
instruments, in front of the multicolored background of the canvases of the Cirque
Corvi.”23 Furthermore, a small—but for the present discussion crucial—pencil sketch by
Seurat of the Corvi’s ticket window serves as proof of the artist’s interest in the specific
material out of which the front of the Corvi tent was made (fig. 86). Just to the right of the
image, Seurat drew an arrow pointing to Corvi’s name above the window and wrote the
words or sur toile, or “gold on canvas.” Although this part of the sketch has, as far as I know,
never been discussed, it lends undeniable weight to the importance of the painted can-
vas in Parade for the meaning of the work as a whole. It is also illuminating to recall that
Toulouse-Lautrec produced two large painted canvases to decorate this type of fairground
stall in the mid-1890s, located at the same itinerant fair as the Cirque Corvi and featuring
the famous performer La Goulue (fig. 87). Without at all suggesting that Seurat saw Parade
as directly akin to this kind of painting, Lautrec’s canvases nevertheless helpfully demon-
strate that artists of this period might well have seen such painted surfaces in some kind of
close relation to their own work.
I propose that this alignment in Parade of the picture’s surface with part of the
represented scene should be understood in relation to the flatness of the depicted scene
and to Seurat’s exploration of new ways to evoke the depth of the outside world in his
pictures. That is, Seurat’s sustained investigation into the various ways that painting can
represent the depth of the real world—from his series strategy to his painted borders to
linear perspective to the representation of the same figure from different points of view in
Poseuses—is also, in part, an implicit acknowledgment that these devices and strategies are
an attempt to recoup or approximate something that is always and fundamentally absent
from painting. The left half of Parade suggests that, if paintings can never fully or satisfac-
torily represent the three-dimensionality of the real world, they nevertheless can evoke
the thickness of real objects in the world, such as painted canvases, by means of their own
material surfaces. In other words, if the referent of the picture is in line with the physical
nature of the painting itself, then the realist potential of painting can be realized. However,
the alignment of pictorial support and represented object also enhances Parade’s flatness,
for spatial illusionism relies, in part, on the invisibility of the painting’s surface; this is
another way in which Seurat defies the basic conventions of perspectival painting in this

131 seductive sights

 picture. But this merger of painting and subject partially redeems the work’s flatness by
transforming it from an absence or deficiency of depth into an assertion of material pres-
ence. In short, the flatness of Parade can evoke the substance of the real world in a way that
conventional illusionism never can.
Seurat’s analysis of different kinds of pictorial representation and the nature and
limits of pictorial illusionism through the inclusion of a painting within the painting is
not limited to the painted canvas in the background of Parade. Just in front of the lower
legs of the musicians on the left hangs a picture of railing balusters or spindles. The photo-
graphs of the exterior of the Corvi show these faux-baluster paintings hanging in front of
the left and right sides of the parade stage, as does the advertisement for the Corvi, and
Seurat alludes to its presence by rendering this part of the picture with particular ambi-
guity. The individual spindles correspond in a rough way with what we imagine to be the
lower legs of the background musicians, but the vertical forms are both too thin and not
quite in alignment with the rest of their bodies to read convincingly as legs. After taking
note of the horizontal railing in front of what would be the musicians’ knees, one might
instead try to understand these forms as spindles attached to this railing. But neither
interpretation comfortably resolves the uncertainty that one experiences looking at this
part of Parade, and it is only once one realizes that we are actually looking at a represen-
tation of a painting of balusters, through which the legs of the musicians standing just
behind this canvas are rendered partially visible, that we are able to make sense of this part
of Seurat’s painting.24 Indeed, Seurat seems to be making a sly allusion to the canvas cloth
that hangs in front of these musicians’ legs and that partially obscures them by depicting
the central trombonist without anything covering his lower legs. The unclothed, fully
visible lower legs of the latter hint at the cloth that partially hides the legs of the other
figures from view. The four musicians in the background (one of whom is partially
cropped by the painting’s left edge) are thus inserted between two canvases, a series of
three-dimensional bodies sandwiched between two flat paintings. In other words, these
musicians constitute “actual” manifestations of the fictive depth and volume behind the
picture plane of illusionistic painting.
The resolute flatness of Parade, the association between pictorial illusionism and
visual and epistemological uncertainty, the emphasis on pictorial opacity through a merg-
ing of the support surface and parts of the represented scene, and the picture’s spectral
qualities all call to mind a specific and especially self-reflexive tradition in the history of
art, namely, trompe l’oeil imagery. The term, which came into being at the turn of the
nineteenth century, was and is often used quite broadly to refer to highly illusionistic
imagery. Here I mean it to refer to a category of picture in which there exists a genuine
ambiguity and structural alignment between the picture itself and the objects represented
therein. Although Parade looks nothing like conventional trompe l’oeil pictures, I think the
similarities between this kind of imagery and the painting are worthy of exploration. For
one, the illusionism of trompe l’oeil images almost always highlights the flatness of the

132 seductive sights

 work itself, rather than having to deny this flatness in order to convince the viewer of the
reality of the represented scene. The coincident relationship between the paintings near
the parade stage and the painting itself very much recalls the relationship of many trompe
l’oeil pictures to their subjects, such as letter racks, objects hanging on walls or placed in
shallow niches, sheets of paper or images such as prints or paintings, to give some exam-
ples. In all of these instances, the flatness of the picture’s surface is not an obstacle to over-
come in order to create the illusionism of the work but is, instead, a constitutive part of
that illusionism. As Hanneke Grootenboer argues in her analysis of seventeenth-century
Dutch trompe l’oeil pictures: “Departing from the dominant story of Western art, where
realism has developed in line with Albertian perspective, the trompe l’oeil has pursued a
different direction, arriving at a form of realism precisely by eliminating any suggestion of
pictorial depth.”25 The doubling of picture and represented objects in Parade, thus, is part
and parcel of Seurat’s rejection of the main tools of post-Renaissance illusionism—chiar-
oscuro, orthogonals, foreshortening, a unified light source, clear figure-ground distinc-
tions, and so on—in the picture, and is part of his pursuit of a radically different form of
realism in the work. And, at least according to some theorizations of trompe l’oeil paint-
ings, the fusion of the representation and the thing represented in these kinds of pictures
can have a distinctly “hallucinatory” or “apparitional” quality that has a “stupefying” effect
on the viewer, all terms that completely accord with the subject of the fairground perfor-
mance and with Seurat’s infusion of a sense of the spectral and the magical into Parade.26
Finally, trompe l’oeil painting is a genre that highlights both the fallibility or limits of
vision and the pleasure one takes in visual and cognitive uncertainty, all of which it has
in common both with the subject of the fairground spectacle and with certain aspects of
Seurat’s body of later figural paintings.
The self-referentiality that I argue is fundamental to Parade’s meaning is also
expressed through the bisected structure of the painting. In chapter 2, I argued that the
two halves of Poseuses, separated by a model that stands at their intersection, evoke differ-
ent paradigms of painting in relation to the opacity or transparency of its surface and its
metaphorical relationship to the wall on which it hangs. Looking at Parade and Poseuses
in relation to each other—and we should remind ourselves here that the only time Seurat
exhibited Parade was alongside Poseuses—one sees a number of surprising similarities
that have not been given much, if any, attention. Both paintings, for example, feature
single figures that stand at the exact center of the respective images and that have almost
identical silhouettes and poses: facing the viewer frontally, theirs are contrapposto poses
with weight shifted to one leg, arms bent at the elbow and held close to their bodies. Each
figure bisects the composition, and each half of each picture, I propose, presents a differ-
ent model of painting and spatial illusionism. I argued in chapter 2 that the Grande Jatte
reprise on the left side of Poseuses evokes the perspectival model of painting and the atten-
dant invisibility of the material surface of the picture and of the wall on which it hangs
in order to create the illusion of spatial depth. By contrast, the right side of Poseuses and,

133 seductive sights

 more specifically, the four framed works foreground the material reality of painting as a
physical object that hangs on a wall. This same opposition is presented in the two halves
of Parade on either side of the central musician, with the left side of the painting consti-
tuted by the painted expanse of canvas in the background and the right side by a series of
window and door panes. Here it is the right side of the work that evokes the long-standing
metaphor of painting as a window, by means of the transparent glass panes that give us
glimpses inside the circus tent. The interior lights that shine through the glass allude to
the fictive transparency of the pictorial surface that the window metaphor is meant to
evoke, a transparency that is a prerequisite for the painting’s ability to create the illusion
of recessive depth “behind” the picture plane. In such an aggressively flat picture as Parade,
these panes of glass and the orbs of light that shine through them hold out the alluring
promise of space, the ticket seller that sits behind the ticket window serving as an instanti-
ation of the depth that exists on the other side of the glass. The counterpart to these panes
of glass on the other side of the painting is the large expanse of painted canvas in the back-
ground of the parade stage, which I propose represents an antiperspectival, nonnarrative
model of painting that, instead, highlights its own opacity and materiality. Just as was the
case with the four framed pictures on the right side of Poseuses, so too does the illegibility
of the images on the large canvas depicted in the left half of Parade help to emphasize the
flatness of its surface, an illegibility that Seurat has ensured by substituting abstract forms
for the representational scenes painted on the real background of the parade of the Corvi
(indeed, these two models of painting are represented not only by the left and right halves
of Parade, but also within its left half; while the painted balusters represent an illusionistic
model of painting, the larger background canvas evokes painting’s opacity and its identity
as a material object). It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between Poseuses and Parade once
they come into view. The repetition of the bisected structure and the same attendant sets
of oppositions in the two works make the significance of these issues to the paintings and
to Seurat seem irrefutable.
In sum, Seurat’s later figural paintings like Parade constitute an alternative defini-
tion not only of vision but also of representation, for these later figural pictures evoke
the ability of images to disorient and transfix their viewers, much like the spectacles
that they depict. Indeed, painting itself is an important part of the allure of the parade
of the Corvi. These later works also engage directly with other kinds of pictures, such as
advertisements, that aim to elicit a sense of fantasy and desire. In this way, Seurat’s œuvre
restages a central debate in the history of art about whether it is painting’s task to provide
knowledge or pleasure, to edify or seduce its viewers. Relatedly, Seurat’s extended explo-
ration of the various kinds and effects of pictorial illusionism across his body of work also
highlights the different ends to which illusionism itself can be put, for it, too, can be used
to inform and orient or to create a sense of pleasurable confusion, to impart knowledge
about the outside world or to induce our distrust of sight and an awareness of its episte-
mological limitations.

134 seductive sights

 Again, I do not mean to argue that Seurat equates his own spectators with those pic-
tured in his images, or that he wants to fully align his later figural paintings with the enter-
tainments that they depict. The prominent self-referential motifs that Seurat includes not
only in Parade but in most of his later figural pictures—motifs such as paintings within
paintings, mirrors, windows, and curtains—function, in part, to give his viewers the
possibility of a more self-aware mode of looking and spectatorship. These motifs create a
more cognitively active and self-conscious viewing experience for Seurat’s audience, one
that is not elicited from the audiences of the live spectacles that he depicts. In sum, the
self-reflexivity of these late works establishes a critical distance not only between Seurat’s
pictures and the spectacles represented therein but also between his viewers and his
painted audiences.
Seurat’s next two figural paintings, Chahut and Young Woman Powdering Herself,
made their public debut together at the 1890 Salon des Indépendants (see figs. 77, 88). The
pair manifests some of the same oppositions seen in Poseuses and Parade; Young Woman, a
portrait of Seurat’s lover at her toilette, and Chahut, which represents a group of cancan
dancers performing in front of an audience, again enact the juxtaposition of private and
public spaces, the intimate world of Seurat and the anonymous world of performers
and audiences, of private looking and public spectating, of solitude and the crowd. Most
critics interpreted Chahut as an illustration of Charles Henry’s psychophysiological
theories of the emotional impact of lines, which I will elaborate on shortly. In terms
of critical attention, Chahut almost completely eclipsed its counterpart. Young Woman
Powdering Herself was barely mentioned in any of the exhibition reviews, and it remains,
to this day, the least discussed of Seurat’s figural paintings.27 The relative silence from
contemporary critics and later art historians is perhaps due to the seemingly anomalous
status of Young Woman within Seurat’s œuvre. It is his only single-figure painting, and
it stands apart from the world of popular entertainments that was the focus of his other
late figural pictures. But, in fact, the painting manifests many of the same concerns that
I have outlined thus far. In it, Seurat continues to explore how painting might evoke
the three-dimensionality of the outside world in new ways and to analyze diverse para-
digms of painting and illusionism, in part through the prominent inclusion of pictorially
self-referential motifs. Young Woman also marks Seurat’s continued meditation on the
distinct experiential ends to which vision can be directed. Indeed, I want to situate the
painting and its exhibition counterpart Chahut as direct engagements on Seurat’s part
with the relationship between vision and desire and with images that posit their viewers
as fundamentally desirous beings.
While both the theme and title of Young Woman Powdering Herself are rather generic,
the sitter was much more familiar to Seurat than either subject or title would indicate.
Madeleine Knoblock was an artist’s model with whom Seurat began a relationship in 1889,
if not earlier, and who was pregnant with his child when Seurat painted this picture of her.
Their relationship supposedly remained a secret until the very last days of his life, when

135 seductive sights


OPPOSITE FIGURE 88
Georges Seurat, Young Woman
Powdering Herself, 1889–90. Oil on
canvas, 375/8 × 311/4 in. (95.5 × 79.5
cm). Courtauld Institute Galleries,
London (P.1932.SC.396).
FIGURE 89
Advertisement for Félix Potin per-
fume products, c. 1893. Biblio-
thèque nationale de France (LI
mat-10 (parfumerie)-Boite Fol.).
137
he suddenly fell ill and retreated to his mother’s house with Madeleine and their infant
son, thereby revealing the existence of his secret family. In the process of dividing Seurat’s
property after his death in March of 1891, Knoblock referred to Young Woman as mon por-
trait and thereby identified herself as the subject of the painting.28 While we can’t know
how closely the portrait actually resembles her, Seurat’s care in delineating the features of
his sitter is remarkable in comparison with the figural works that immediately preceded
and followed it. From the curly hair that covers her forehead and the back of her neck, to
the dark, fine eyebrows and thick eyelashes that frame her eyes, to her delicate and slightly
upturned nose, rosebud lips, and fleshy cheeks and neck, Seurat attentively renders her
features as a combination of delicacy and plumpness. The tightness of her corset accen-
tuates her voluptuous breasts and round arms, and the expanse of her billowed skirt sug-
gests the ampleness of her lower body. Seurat’s representation of the fullness of her body
is lent particular intimacy when one considers that it is partially due to Madeleine being
pregnant with Seurat’s child when she sat for the portrait. Regardless of whether or not
one knows that this is an image of Seurat’s lover, her voluptuousness and state of partial
undress make her sexual appeal unambiguous.
But my understanding of Young Woman as an exploration of the relationship
between vision and desire and of the seductive effects of certain kinds of images extends
beyond the fact that Seurat is showing us an attractive young woman at her toilette. More
broadly, I would argue that Seurat has partially modeled this work on the visual language
of advertisements, images that are specifically designed to elicit the desire of the viewer.
To give just one example, Seurat’s painting bears a rather close resemblance to a late
nineteenth-century advertisement for Félix Potin perfume products (fig. 89). The female
figures share a similar pose, gesture, hairstyle, and clothing, are both seated in front of an
array of beauty products and against similarly patterned backgrounds, and even occupy
the same size and position relative to the rest of the composition. Although the adver-
tisement dates to around 1893 and thus could not have been a direct source for Seurat’s
picture, the similarity between the two suggests Seurat’s adoption in his painting of the
general language of advertising imagery.29 It is this likeness that, in part, situates Young
Woman as an exploration of the mechanisms of sexual and consumer desire and as an anal-
ysis of imagery designed to arouse the appetites of its viewers.
Seurat’s engagement with the world of advertisements should come as no surprise,
given his well-documented interest in the posters of Jules Chéret. In 1890, Jules Antoine
wrote that Seurat “had spoken to me about Chéret . . . [in] private conversations” about
his work. Émile Verhaeren also cited discussions with Seurat in which the artist revealed
his admiration for Chéret’s posters and their significance to him: “The last renovation
attempted by Seurat led toward the study and the laws of line. The poster-maker Chéret,
whose genius he had adored, enchanted him with the joy and the gaiety of his designs.
He had studied them, he had wanted to take apart the means of expression and catch
the esthetic secrets. . . . One year passed, he ended up with Chahut and then Circus.”30 Art
seductive sights
FIGURE 90
Georges Seurat, Young Woman
Powdering Herself (detail of fig. 88).
historians have written quite extensively about the relationship between Chéret and Seurat,
usually focusing on the former’s posters for public entertainment venues in relation to
Seurat’s images of similar establishments. Much less frequently discussed is Seurat’s pos-
sible interest in Chéret’s consumer product advertisements, even though these constituted
a significant portion of all his poster designs. More generally, Paris was absolutely inun-
dated with advertising imagery of all kinds in the 1880s, thanks to changes in the laws that
governed advertisements in public space. A rather extensive discourse soon emerged on
the sensory and psychological effects that these images had on their viewers, frequently
discussed in terms of inducing a diminishment of the passerby’s cognitive faculties and an
intense desire for whatever it was that was being advertised. We might see Young Woman
(as well as Chahut and Circus), then, as images that not only posit a desirous viewing subject,
but that engage with the world of advertising and consumer goods more broadly, explor-
ing the various pictorial mechanisms that can be used to visually seduce viewers.31
Earlier I spoke of the figure in Young Woman as defined, above all, by a sense of
voluptuousness, part of Seurat’s broader delineation in this picture of a particular, and
peculiar, kind of three-dimensionality unlike that in any of his other images. The strange-
ness of the space and of the objects that fill it comes, in part, from the ambiguity through-
out the picture between two- and three-dimensional images and objects, as if the forms we
are looking at were capable of swelling and deflating, going back and forth between full
and flat. The upper body of the female figure, for example, seems almost overly inflated,

138 seductive sights

 while her lower body tapers into a much flatter expanse of fabric. Similarly, the swirls of
dark blue patterning on the back wall lend a sense of undulatory movement to an osten-
sibly flat, smooth surface, as if it, too, might be able to expand and contract. This ambi-
guity multiplies the longer one looks at the picture, and this seemingly straightforward
image of a woman at her toilette begins to take on a dreamlike, fantastic quality, in which
the distinctions between volumetric and flat, between figure and ground, are impossi-
ble to fully pin down. The flower that rests atop the mirror, for example, appears to be
“three-dimensional,” but its similarity to the “flat,” pink, petal-like forms on the back wall
not only unsettles the clear distinction between flat and round but also suggests some sort
of connection, albeit a mysterious one, between these parts of the scene (fig. 90). A white
flower with a long, thin stem just below the pink flower seems at once to rest on the table
in front of Madeleine and to merge into the wallpaper pattern, appearing slightly flatter
than the other objects on the table but fuller than the other forms on the wall. Likewise,
the tassle that swings out from the framed object in the upper left corner of the painting
(about which I’ll say more shortly) seems “three-dimensional,” but it, too, is very similar
in shape and color to the supposedly flat pattern on the wallpaper. As such, some of the
“three-dimensional” objects in the painting appear as if they have somehow emerged from
or are receding into the “two-dimensional” ground of the wall and, in the process, seem
to undergo a transformation from flat to full or vice versa. Relatedly, the profusion of
wavelike and flowerlike forms in this picture helps to create the impression of a palpitat-
ing or undulating space that has somehow bloomed into three-dimensionality. Lastly, the
proportions of the various objects in the picture and the spatial relations between them
appear implausible, for the space of the picture is too shallow to contain the figure of
Knoblock and the table at which she sits, and the distance between her and the object in
the upper left corner seems somehow too great. All of these features infuse the painting
with a sense of the fantastic, its surfaces, forms, and spaces failing to conform to the laws
of space and form as we know them. In sum, Young Woman, I would propose, is a funda-
mentally irrational picture, as if Seurat were trying to image a scene fantasized into being
by desire itself. It is this evocation of desire not just on the level of subject matter but
also through the composition, spatial structure, and form of the work that differentiates
Seurat’s painting in fundamental respects from other roughly contemporaneous images of
women at their toilette, such as Manet’s Nana or Morisot’s Young Woman Powdering Herself,
to give just two examples.
Interpreting Young Woman as an attempt on the artist’s part to develop a different
kind of pictorial space helps us better understand the meaning of the somewhat perplex-
ing object in the upper left corner of the painting (fig. 91). The strong similarity between
the framed image and the still-life ensemble in front of Madeleine, both of which feature
a wooden table on top of which rests a pink, flowerlike object, encourages a more sus-
tained comparison of the picture-within-a-picture and the larger painting. After careful

139 seductive sights

FIGURE 91 consideration, and judging by its distinctly impasto-looking surface, it seems to be a
Georges Seurat, Young Woman painting set within a frame that appears very much like window-shutters, thus evok-
Powdering Herself (detail of fig.
ing the metaphor of painting as a window onto a rational, coherent, three-dimensional
88).
space.32 Indeed, the smaller picture, we come to realize, self-consciously displays some of
the essential illusionistic conventions for the representation of three-dimensional objects
in two-dimensional form; both the flower container and the table on which it rests are
turned in space and positioned at an angle to the picture plane, as if to demonstrate the
use of foreshortening in creating the illusion of volumetric forms. The abundance of
straight lines and right angles in this little picture makes clear its conformity to the laws of
geometry and linear perspective. The larger picture, by contrast, flagrantly eschews these
illusionistic norms and the sense of rationality and spatial coherence that they serve to
create as much as the little picture embraces them. The curvilinearity of the table and still-
life objects in front of Madeleine is no doubt meant as a rejoinder to the rigid geometry of
the table and vase just above, the former escaping the laws of perspective and foreshorten-
ing just as the latter illustrate them, much in the way that the curve of the upper corners
of the larger painting’s border contrast with the angles of the smaller picture’s frame.33 In
short, the picture-within-a-picture of Young Woman has a self-reflexive function that is
analogous to the paintings in Parade and Poseuses, as well as to other self-referential motifs
in Seurat’s late figural works.
What I argue is the self-reflexivity of the picture in Young Woman has been corrob-
orated by the recent discovery of an image of Seurat at his easel underneath the one of
the table and flower vase. The possible existence of this phantom self-portrait was first
discussed by Robert Rey in his 1931 book, but the absence of sufficiently advanced imaging

140 seductive sights

 technology forced the subject to remain in the realm of speculation. However, recent anal-
ysis undertaken at the Courtauld Institute of Art has yielded a clear image of a male figure
in front of an easel that seems to confirm the long-held rumor, indicating that the picture
in the upper left was once a representation of a mirror reflecting an image of the artist at
work.34 Although we can’t know why Seurat painted over this self-portrait, its very exis-
tence indicates the importance of this part of the picture for the meaning of the larger
painting and makes clear that the artist viewed this framed object in highly self-referential
terms. Not only did the framed mirror image reveal the artist himself, but it also depicted
at least part of the larger Young Woman on which the artist was working, As such, the
smaller image was reflective, literally and figuratively, of the painting as a whole. Thus,
in a variety of ways, the newly discovered underimage would have functioned much as I
argue the painting of the table and flower vase does.
Like the rest of the picture, the substantive frame around the painting in the upper
left also speaks directly to the game of spatial illusionism, with the painted image giving
the impression of receding “back” into space and the frame conveying the distinct illusion
of projecting “forward.” Not only does it protrude slightly from the wall on which it hangs,
creating a perceptible shadow underneath its bottom edge, but the two doors on either
side of it also prominently “extend out” into space. The small latch or tassel that was used
to pull these doors open is rather conspicuously delineated, encouraging us to imagine the
swing of the doors as they moved from being parallel to the picture plane, flush against
the picture, to their current position supposedly projecting out from the frame and at
an angle to the picture’s surface. But, as I pointed out earlier, this tassel or latch resem-
bles both the flat pink forms on the back wall as well as the blooming flower in front of
Madeleine, more volumetric than the former but flatter than the latter, and thus partak-
ing of the more general confusion between flat and round that defines the larger picture.
Finally but importantly, the embellished japonisme of the wooden frame around the small
painting relates directly to Seurat’s analysis and defiance of the norms of Western pictorial
representation in the larger work, insofar as the frame evokes the alternative pictorial
codes and systems of representation of Japanese imagery, especially with regard to the
rendering of space and depth. Taken as a whole, Young Woman Powdering Herself is not,
then, a transparent window onto a rational space, in which figure and ground, flat and
three-dimensional, surface and volume are clearly distinguishable from one another. It
is, instead, a picture in which spaces and forms heave and billow, blossom and deflate, in
which rationality partially gives way to a more entranced, improbable, desirous mode of
looking and imaging.
Alongside Young Woman at the 1890 Salon des Indépendants, Seurat exhibited
Chahut, another painting whose central subject is, I would argue, the relationship between
vision and sexual desire and the ways that certain visual phenomena induce an irrational,
intoxicated mode of being. Indeed, the chahut, which was a kind of cancan that became
very popular in late nineteenth-century Paris, was commonly characterized as a sexually

141 seductive sights

 provocative dance that had an intensely seductive effect on spectators. Seurat thus chose
to depict a quintessentially erotic subject, defined by Larousse a few decades before as “an
indecent dance, today forbidden in public places.”35 Seurat’s choice of subjects for Chahut
is thus entirely in keeping with what I’ve argued is his sustained interest in the different
ends to which vision might be put, in this case, the disoriented state of mind induced by
sexual desire. Seurat shows us the series of dancers with their legs fully extended, hands
expertly holding up their skirts to give the spectators a much-hoped-for glimpse of that
which lies beneath. The prominence given to the leering, snout-faced male spectator in the
picture’s right corner, his phallic cane rising up toward the dancers, makes the centrality
of sexual desire and the erotics of spectatorship to the meaning of the painting abso-
lutely unmistakable.
Indeed, at least one critic characterized Chahut exactly in terms of the dance’s
arousal of an uncontrolled desire in the spectator: “This work is a frenetic spasm of a
breathless gnome and of a ghoul in heat! Supreme hymn of palpitating flesh. . . . I am
breathless, and more than one, I swear, sticks out his tongue and bends his unfulfilled
arms, hypnotized by the hectic transports of a monstrous and degrading indecency!”36
This “hypnotic” state of “unfulfilled” desire is, similarly to Young Woman Powdering Herself,
expressed in terms of the eschewal of many of the conventions of pictorial realism, the
figures derived as if from a fantasy and set in a space that is impossible to make rational
sense of. Their faces are extremely stylized, even caricatural, and their bodies are rendered
as neither flat nor three-dimensional, but somehow both, stacked one in front of the other
on an impossibly narrow stage that seems to dissolve as it moves back in space. Here, too,
as in Young Woman, space and form reflect a world brought into being not by reason but
by desire, induced by the dancer’s keen sense of how visual experience can create a state of
intoxicating arousal.
Numerous contemporary accounts of the chahut attest to the fact that its erotic
charge had everything to do with sight, that is, with the strategic revealing and hiding of
certain parts of the dancer’s body and undergarments. The choreography of the chahut
centered on the tantalizing concealment and exposure of undergarments and skin, the
dancer kicking her legs up and holding her skirt to induce an increasing sense of sexual
frenzy in her audience. One such account was an 1891 illustrated supplement to Gil Blas
devoted to the chahut that proved so popular, it was developed into an independent,
illustrated book the following year titled Cours de danse n de siècle. Written by Eugène
Rodrigues and illustrated by Louis Legrand, the text focuses primarily on the pupils at a
dance school as they work to master the intricacies of the chahut. The text is filled with
descriptions of the specific effects the dance was intended to elicit, and one passage goes
as follows: “Her legs were bent, swinging, beating the air, threatening hats, leading all
eyes to look under her skirt; these thieving looks pursuing there the much hoped-for but
always fleeting slit in her embroidered pantalons. And all around her, this incessant state of
tension of the eyes drives the men crazy.” The arousal of the viewer through the elaborate

142 seductive sights

 withholding and offering of flesh and undergarments to the spectator’s desirous gaze is
referred to throughout Rodrigues’s text. Describing the chahut dancer’s maneuvering of
her petticoat, which he referred to as “the true work tool of the dancer,” he writes: “This
petticoat must leave the most captivating impressions on the public. . . . Her movement,
insofar as it unveils her limbs, pushes them into the spotlight. She only hides them in
order to arouse the desire to see them.”37
Other contemporary accounts of the chahut and its intended psychological effects
characterize them in nearly identical terms as Rodrigues, confirming both that the dance
was closely associated with the arousal of sexual desire and that sight was the mecha-
nism with which this state of arousal was achieved. Just a few years before Seurat painted
Chahut, for example, the Symbolist writer and art critic Jean Ajalbert published a poem on
the chahut that closely aligns with Rodrigues’s text and Seurat’s picture. “The footlights,
a serpentine line of brightness / At the feet of the female dancer, aflame / Illuminating
the obscenity / Of her smile and her leg / The leg that she throws high up / Straight
toward the frenetic audience / Piercing everyone’s eyes / with her sealed undergarment.”38
Ajalbert was a central figure in the circle of writers with whom the Neo-Impressionists
associated, and he wrote an important, very positive review of the Neo-Impressionists in
June of 1886. He and Seurat not only knew each other but were on good personal terms,
as evidenced by the poet’s ownership of a few small works by Seurat, likely given to him
as gifts by the artist sometime in 1886 or 1887. Thus, it seems very plausible that Seurat
knew Ajalbert’s poem but, even if he didn’t, the text usefully illustrates how closely this
particular dance was identified with sexual provocation (as well as acknowledges the role
of intense artificial illumination in creating this intoxicating visual experience, which
Seurat’s painting also does). Ajalbert specifically highlights the eyes of the spectators as the
target of the dancer’s seductive gestures and choreography. As such, the poem absolutely
accords with what I see is Seurat’s interest in the ways that vision can induce a desirous
state of being in the world.
It is in light of Seurat’s interest in picturing a world and a state of mind that cen-
tered on fantasy and the erotics of vision that we should partially understand his engage-
ment with the imagery of Jules Chéret and the similarity of images like Chahut and Circus
to those of the poster designer. Regardless of the product or establishment they were
advertising, Chéret’s posters were reflections of viewers’ fantasies and desires. And, almost
without exception, these fantasies were imaged by Chéret through the female figure, many
of whom bear a general resemblance to the women in Chahut and Circus. Indeed, count-
less contemporary accounts of Chéret’s posters discussed them in relation to the seductive
and entrancing quality of the women that they featured. In an 1893 issue of the journal La
Plume devoted to the illustrated poster, one writer addressed himself to Chéret and wrote:
“Your women are the women of dreams. . . . They have the sharp flavor of ether or mor-
phine,” while another described the female figures in the posters that covered the public
spaces of Paris as “the enchanters of the street,” and a third characterized Chéret’s women

143 seductive sights

 as “creatures made for visual and mental temptation.”39 Another writer directly likened
the psychological fantasy elicited by Chéret’s posters to various kinds of illusions and
deceptions found in modern life and popular entertainments: “The illustrated poster . . .
[is] the symbol of our fin-de-siècle life, cosmeticized, flashy, garish, deceptive. It is not only
the street that is illuminated and enflamed like a colossal magic lantern, like the fifth act
of a magical extravaganza. . . . It is also the illusion for everyone and for anything, a bit of
dream and of delightful deception introduced via the eyes to the soul.” And yet another
writer described the seeming impossibility of evading the seductions of poster imagery in
the following way: “No matter how one tries, we cannot escape it. From our windows, we
see the advertisement on the house next door. If we go out, advertisements precede us and
follow us. It is all around us, to the right, to the left, every place. . . . She holds us inexora-
bly.” One writer’s discussion of Chéret’s women is also a remarkably fitting description
of the female dancers in Seurat’s Chahut: “The primary concern of Chéret is to find the
gesture, walk, wave, rhythm, or flight of his preferred model, this Parisienne, of a desired
height, a hieratic smile . . . who is intoxicated with her own apotheosis.” A few pages later,
he continues: “Where the colored poster returns to over and over again, where it takes
its pleasure, where it triumphs, is in the representation of a female being with teasing
features, half fairy princess and half prostitute, [with] half-open lips . . . promising eyes . . .
an illusory type, be it swaying in a cloud of gauze, be it on horseback,” or, in the case of
Chahut, be it a cancan dancer onstage, performing for her mesmerized audience.40
Most of the critics who wrote about Chahut when it was exhibited situated it, if
sometimes only in passing, in relation to Charles Henry’s theories on the emotional
impact of line in art. Henry was a mathematician and aesthetician who was close to
Symbolist writers such as Gustave Kahn and Félix Fénéon and with whom Paul Signac
collaborated on various projects in the late 1880s. According to Seurat, he first read
Henry’s work in 1885 and met him in person the following year. It was, more specifically,
with Henry’s theories on the emotional impact of pictorial elements such as color and
especially line, based on a pseudoscientific combination of mathematics, physiology, and
psychology, that Seurat’s last figural paintings were sometimes associated (an association
that Seurat himself made in a few of his letters and written statements).41 Certain aspects
of Young Woman Powdering Herself, Chahut, and Circus were said to be designed in accor-
dance with Henry’s theories that ascending lines evoke a sense of gaiety or pleasure in
the viewer, descending lines evoke a sense of sadness or pain, and straight lines produce
a sense of calmness or emotional neutrality. Some critics saw the prominence of diagonal
lines in Chahut—the dancers’ legs, the instruments of the musicians, the upward tilt of the
dancers’ heads, the ribbons of their costumes, and so on—as evidence of Seurat’s incor-
poration of Henry’s theories into his work. The supposed appeal for Seurat of these the-
ories was their systematic “decoding” of a fundamental element of painting, such as line,
that defined its impact on the viewer as being fixed and consistent. But the implications
of Henry’s conception of line in art and his model of the viewing subject are both worth

144 seductive sights

 pausing over to consider more carefully. In Henry’s system, it is the directionality of line
itself that seems to take priority and that determines the effect of the picture on the viewer,
rather than the specific objects that the line delineates. Seurat’s interest in Henry’s theories
should thus be seen in the context of the increasing distance that Seurat’s late works take
from conventional illusionism. This shift in Seurat’s painting, though not much discussed
in Seurat scholarship, was certainly noted by contemporary critics. Fénéon, for example,
wrote in reference to the artist’s 1889 Le Crotoy seascapes that “Seurat knows very well
that a line, independently of its topographic role, possesses an abstract value worth taking
into account.” Arsène Alexandre made a similar claim when he wrote that “Seurat, who is
the protagonist of the school of pointillism, searches above all for harmony in the combi-
nation of lines and colors. For him, any scene is an ensemble of lines from which he must
derive a result in view of producing a definite effect.”42 Thus, Seurat’s ostensible incorpo-
ration of Henry’s theories into Chahut and Young Woman, in conjunction with the erot-
ically charged nature of their subject matter, situates these works as meditations on the
ways that pictures might arouse the emotion of their spectators. If Henry’s theories focus
on the effect of line detached from specific subjects or, as Fénéon put it, “independent of
its topographic role,” Young Woman and Chahut very much testify to the psychic potency of
specific kinds of subjects and “topographies,” like Madeleine’s ample curves or the contour
of the chahut dancer’s provocatively raised leg.
In addition to exhibition reviews, there is one other contemporary written account
of Chahut, or at least of a painting that was based on Seurat’s Chahut, the 1890 novel by
Victor Joze titled L’Homme à femmes (The Ladies’ Man). Seurat had multiple connections
to the project, since he not only designed the cover for the novel but also seems to have
served as the model for one of the two main characters, “an impressionist painter of out-
standing talent” by the name of Georges Legrand (fig. 92).43 Very little is known about the
personal relationship between Seurat and Joze, the pseudonym of a Polish writer living in
Paris whose real name was Viktor Dobrski. But in the late 1880s, Joze wrote two articles
for Polish publications promoting Neo-Impressionism, which indicates some firsthand
knowledge of, or at least a very specific interest in, the work of Seurat or the other Neo-
Impressionists. Although the identification of Seurat as the model for Legrand wasn’t
proposed until almost one hundred years after the novel’s publication, the many similar-
ities between the two strongly support such a claim; in addition to sharing the same first
name, both men are tall and bearded, both have apartments and studios on the Boulevard
de Clichy, both have lovers about which little or nothing is known, and both are from
well-off families and live off of stipends. Furthermore, Legrand’s demeanor is identical to
the way that Seurat was described by many of his friends and colleagues: a tireless painter
who was laconic and somewhat socially withdrawn, but who became very animated when
speaking one-on-one about his work. Legrand’s artistic milieu is also more or less the
same as Seurat’s, both figures associating with members of the Symbolist and Decadent
circles, as well as with specific writers and critics, such as Paul Alexis, whom Seurat knew

145 seductive sights

FIGURE 92
Georges Seurat, cover for L’Homme
à femmes (The Ladies’ Man) by
Victor Joze, 1890. Zimmerli Art
Museum, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick (1998.0632).
146
quite well. Finally, in one scene we read that Legrand was working on a painting of “an
eccentric quadrille, danced on an ordinary stage at a café-concert; the two female dancers
had a mischievous beauty, and the provocative gesture of a leg in the air,” a painting that of
course bears a close resemblance to Seurat’s Chahut.44
Although Seurat’s authorship of the cover for the novel has long been known, and
the identification of him as the likely prototype for Legrand is recent but well established,
the relationship between Seurat’s broader interests and the central themes of the novel
has not yet been explored, even though the subjects intersect in important ways. The
main protagonist of L’Homme à femmes is a Naturalist writer named Charles de Montfort,
who is the ladies’ man in the title and whose sexual relationships with various women
over the period of a year provide the novel’s basic plot. Montfort, we quickly learn, is in
more or less constant pursuit of women and is almost never without at least one object of
sexual desire. “He was an artist truly in love with feminine charms, such that he consid-
ered woman like a kind of earthly idol, and he made his love for her a veritable religion,
a pagan cult of flesh . . . and, if they looked beautiful and appealing to him, he didn’t have
seductive sights
 the strength to resist his desire for their charms.” Montfort’s sexual appetites consti-
tute the core of his character, and his artistic productivity is compromised by his nearly
all-consuming interest in women. In short, Montfort very much represents a mode of
being defined by desire and by a loss of self control as he obsessively pursues the various
women that have entranced him. Whenever he was unable to sexually obtain a woman
that he coveted, “he immediately would fall completely ill. For a long time, the image of
the woman would not quit him, pursuing him, haunting him all night, provoking fever-
ish erotic dreams; and the longer he desired this unknown woman, from the moment
that he saw her, the longer a sort of erotic nostalgia would take hold of him, dominating
him, torturing him until the day that irrevocably chased it away.” The character based on
Seurat, Georges Legrand, is both Montfort’s best friend and polar opposite. Unlike his
perpetually amorous friend, Legrand is a highly productive artist who is utterly devoted to
his work, and his romantic attachments are dispensed with in a single sentence: “For sev-
eral years he kept mysterious amorous relations with a married woman who came to see
him during the day, but who couldn’t share his bed in the evening.”45 Legrand diligently
channels his energy into creative pursuits, unlike the unruly, undirected Montfort, who
in several scenes is described as following various women around the city in a kind of
trance. As such, these two figures represent in quite succinct and clear terms some of the
same dichotomies seen in Seurat’s body of work: to produce or to consume, to be driven
by reason or desire, to be grounded or intoxicated. The novel concludes with a conver-
sation between the two artists, in which the Seurat stand-in laments the fact that his
friend’s many amorous liaisons have rendered him gommeux, or “idle,” and have prevented
Montfort from being a productive artist. Importantly, the same term is used to describe
some of the spectators in Legrand’s painting of a chahut performance.46 Montfort, then,
is akin to those audience members caught in a desirous mode of being that has left them
diminished or incapacitated in some way, artistically and cognitively “idle.”
The juxtaposition between two distinct modes of existence also serves as the central
theme of another nineteenth-century French novel, Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (sometimes
translated in English as The Magic Skin) of 1831, which I would argue had a direct influence
on Joze’s text. L’Homme à femmes was part of a larger series of novels by Joze called La
Ménagerie sociale; and in the opening sentence of the introduction to the novel, the author
identifies Balzac’s La Comédie humaine as the inspiration for his own novelistic series. La
Peau de chagrin was one of the novels in Balzac’s series, as well as being his first successful
novel, and it too constitutes a meditation on two opposing modes of being, one devoted
to the pursuit of knowledge, to understanding the world, and to artistic productivity, and
the other driven by desires and appetites that diminish one’s intellectual capacities and
output. The protagonist of the tale is a figure named Raphael de Valentin, a young man
who for years had dedicated himself to study and learning, but who one day wanders into
an antiquarian’s shop and ends up acquiring a piece of leather with magical properties.
He is told by the shopkeeper that the skin can fulfill all of his desires, but that each time it

147 seductive sights

 does so it will shrink until it disappears altogether and Raphael will die. In a rich, lengthy
monologue, the shopkeeper describes the happiness he derived from his own lifelong
pursuit of knowledge, and he urges Raphael to choose the same path: “My one ambition
has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight? And to have knowledge or insight, is not
that to have instinctive possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and
to unite its essence to our essence? . . . Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a man
who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of happiness within him-
self, and thence draw uncounted pleasures in idea, unsoiled by earthly stains. Thought is
a key to all treasures . . . Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have
been intellectual gains. I have reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and
mountains! I have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness.” Raphael is unmoved by
the antiquarian’s entreaties, too seduced by the prospect of having his every wish and fan-
tasy granted to heed his warnings, a choice that is prefigured by the character’s last name.
“Very good, then, a life of riotous excess for me!” he exclaims, and Raphael leaves the store
“blinded by a kind of delirium.” Much of the novel details the indulgences and gradual
decline of Raphael, each intoxicating pleasure further enervating him, especially his pur-
suit of a woman named Foedora, for whom Raphael feels a desire so consuming that it
completely undermines his intellectual productivity and clarity of thought: “I am mad,” he
despairs. “I can feel the madness raging at times in my brain. My ideas are like shadows;
they flit before me, and I cannot grasp them. . . . I gazed about me a long while in the garret
where I had my scholar’s temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been a long and
honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for the fevered existence which had
urged me to the brink of a precipice.”47 La Peau de chagrin, then, like L’Homme à femmes and
like Seurat’s body of work, serves as an exploration of these different modes of existence,
expressed in part through the dynamics of sight and blindness (“My one ambition has
been to see,” proclaims the old antiquarian, equating sight with knowledge and learning).
One is a contemplative mode of being, oriented toward making sense of the outside world
and the acquisition of knowledge about it, the other a state of intoxication, in which one is
constantly consuming and being consumed, driven by the pursuit of pleasures of one kind
or another.
Circus was the last figural painting that Seurat produced, and it was hanging,
unfinished, on the walls of the Salon des Indépendants when he died on March 29, 1891. In
numerous obituaries for the artist, the unfinished state of Circus was employed as a met-
aphor for Seurat’s incomplete œuvre, for the promising but not yet realized greatness of
an artist who died at the young age of thirty-one, and for the unfinished state of the artis-
tic system Seurat had been thought to be so methodically developing. For very different
reasons, I, too, find Circus to be a fitting culmination of Seurat’s body of work, since the
painting, even in its unfinished state, manifests so many of the concerns that I have argued
drove his figure painting practice more broadly. Like Parade and Chahut, of course, Circus
depicts a popular type of performance, in this case one of Paris’s three permanent circuses,

148 seductive sights

 the Cirque Fernando, as well as the spectators taking it in.48 As much as this picture has
in common with popular representations of the circus (about which I’ll say more), these
images usually did not picture the audience members; that Seurat’s picture features them
so prominently is yet another indication of his specific interest in the spectatorial experi-
ence created by these entertainments. And, here too, just as in his previous works, Seurat
emphasizes the passivity of the spectators as they sit in the stands, seemingly happily
transfixed by the sight in front of them. Gustave Kahn’s critique of these forms of leisure
and entertainment for inducing “the partial hypnotization of the individual, relentlessly
seated and a voluntary prisoner” continues to serve as a fitting characterization of Seurat’s
painted audiences and the pleasure they seem to experience in giving themselves over to
the spectacle. And indeed, some reviewers characterized Circus in just these terms, one of
them noting that “the spectators of this performance maintain an absolute passivity” and
another commenting that the figures “have the stiffness of automatons.”49 Like the three
preceding figural paintings, Circus frustrates the viewer’s attempts to make sense of some
of the individual elements within the composition and the larger spatial order of the pic-
ture. Unlike in his two previous images of spectacles, however, Seurat returns in Circus, at
least at first glance, to the notion of painting as “the art of hollowing out a surface.” The
flatness of Parade and Chahut is ostensibly replaced in Circus by a sense of spatial fullness,
the circular rink representing (a portion of) a 360-degree circle.50 And yet, the promise of
easy comprehension that this kind of seemingly unfettered visibility offers is increasingly
undermined the longer that one studies the painting. As one begins to examine the picture
more closely, one encounters multiple stumbling points in trying to make rational sense
of what one sees. For example, there is no consistency of scale in Seurat’s rendering of
the various performers, creating a confusion regarding size and relative distance that led
one critic to remark that the painting is “without any perspective.”51 Although the female
horseback rider and the upside-down acrobat seem to be placed at approximately the
same distance from the viewer, the acrobat is depicted as quite a bit smaller than the rider.
Conversely, the acrobat seems to be positioned very close to the standing figures in the
middle-right portion of the background, just behind the rink, yet looms over them and
appears to be almost twice their size. Try as one might, it is impossible to make complete
sense of the space within the painting or of the spatial relationships between the figures
that populate the scene. In addition, Seurat conflates different viewing positions with
regard to eye level, rendering the scene as if we were looking at its various elements from
straight on, from below, and from above simultaneously. In short, the consistency of a
single viewing position is eschewed in favor of multiple, irreconcilable viewpoints that
undercut the spatial coherence of the overall composition.
Also like Seurat’s other figural works, Circus prominently features motifs, namely,
the curtain in the foreground and the rectangular, red-framed mirror above the partially
curtained doorway in the background, that I would argue have a distinctly self-referential
meaning. Circus thus continues Seurat’s meditation from previous works on the nature

149 seductive sights

FIGURE 93
Karl Gampenrieder, At the Circus,
n.d. Chromolithograph, 161/4 ×
121/4 in. (41 × 31 cm). Musée d’Or-
say, Paris. Gift of Françoise
Cachin, 1989.
150
and effects of pictorial illusionism, on the history and conventions for the creation of a
sense of depth in painting, and on distinct pictorial paradigms. A good deal has been writ-
ten about the general similarity of Circus to popular representations of the subject and,
indeed, many, but not all, of the elements of Seurat’s composition can be found in other
contemporary circus imagery. One image in particular bears a uniquely close resemblance
to Seurat’s painting, a chromolithograph by a German painter named Karl Gampenrieder
titled At the Circus that was found among Signac’s possessions in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury (fig. 93). Although we don’t know for certain that it was originally owned by Seurat,
its strong similarity to Circus makes it seem probable that it once belonged to him and
that it served as a source for the painting. Signac likely found it in his colleague’s studio
after his death, rather than having acquired it independently.52 Looking closely at the two
pictures side by side, one notices multiple similarities not only between the individual
components that make up each picture but also in their overall structure. These similari-
ties make the few substantive differences between the two, and Seurat’s departure not only
from the model of Gampenrieder’s picture but from the usual iconography and compo-
sitional formats of circus imagery more broadly, all the more significant. As one can see,
Gampenrieder’s picture contains neither the curtain in the foreground nor the mirror just
below the orchestra in the background, and it is to these elements that I now turn.
seductive sights
 Given what I have shown is the prevalence of potentially self-reflexive motifs in
Seurat’s body of figural paintings, Seurat’s addition of two such elements to Circus, ones
that are not part of the typical iconography of the subject, should come as no surprise.
Seurat’s painting contains, in fact, not one but two curtains, one in the foreground and
one in the background, the latter called a gardine that hung in the montoir, that is, the
entrance to the ring that was used by the performers and the animals.53 The gardine and
the montoir are quite common features of circus imagery of the time, but a curtain in the
foreground most certainly is not. What’s more, Seurat has rendered it in such a way that
its relationship to the rest of the scene is irresolvably indeterminate, giving no indication
either of a door that it might cover or of any other architectural or structural element to
which it might be related. The clown who clasps it in his right hand also seems to exist
at a remove from the rest of the composition, as if both he and the curtain occupy an
interstitial space between the circus scene in front of them and the viewers of the painting
behind them, both within and outside of the world of the painting. In fact, the curtain in
the foreground of Circus very much recalls certain seventeenth-century Dutch images that
feature painted curtains positioned distinctly in front of, rather than within, the natural-
istic scene, such as in certain types of trompe l’oeil paintings, thereby subtly suggesting
yet again Seurat’s familiarity with this pictorial tradition. Thus, the foreground curtain in
Circus seems to have a special function and identity in comparison with the other motifs
in the painting, meriting further scrutiny than it has thus far received in written accounts
of the work.
As one’s attention lingers on this part of the painting, one can’t help but recall the
prominence of the curtain motif in the history of art, both as a means for creating a sense
of depth in pictures and as one of the most potent symbols of illusionism and pictorial
self-reflexivity. For one, a curtain in the foreground of a picture is a classic repoussoir
device long employed by artists to create a sense of spatial recession in their images. As
such, it constitutes yet another example of Seurat’s reference to the ways that artists have
tried to re-create the fullness of the world in two-dimensional imagery, and is yet fur-
ther evidence of his abiding interest in the history and mechanisms of spatial illusionism.
Curtains are also one of the oldest signs for pictorial illusionism and, at least since Pliny’s
account of Zeuxis being fooled into asking his rival Parrhasius to move aside a painted
curtain, have underscored the trickery and confusion entailed in some forms of pictorial
mimesis. Seurat’s curtain is not an evocation of an Albertian pictorial window; rather, it
represents the deception and misperception entailed in visual illusions and illusionisms
of various kinds, be they those in painting or at the circus. This curtain also alludes to the
dynamics of visual concealment and exposure, eliciting anticipation for that which can’t
be seen and delight over that which has been revealed, central components of the allure of
spectacles and illusions of all kinds.54
The second potentially self-referential element in Circus that is absent not only from
Gampenrieder’s image but also from other popular representations of the circus is the

151 seductive sights

 mirror that hangs just above the montoir. In Gampenrieder’s picture, this same space is
occupied by a painted decoration of some sort, and no other circus imagery of the time
that I’ve seen includes this motif. Nor is there any evidence that the Cirque Fernando
actually had a mirror in the place where Seurat shows one.55 Like the curtain, the mirror is
one of the quintessential symbols of mimesis in pictorial representation. And, also like the
curtain in the foreground, it is difficult to make sense of this mirror’s relationship to the
rest of the scene. Indeed, it is quite challenging to even identify the object as a mirror or to
decipher the white arc within its red frame. Only if we work at it will we perhaps puzzle
out that we are likely looking at a mirror reflecting a portion of the border of the circus
ring below. Perhaps, then, the ambiguous mirror, its rectangular shape and colored border
resembling the larger painting in which it appears, is a declaration that Circus is in no way
a straightforward representation or reflection of its subject. It functions as a reminder
both of the divergences between the painting and its motif and of the differences between
the experience that each offers its respective audience.
This mirror functions self-reflexively in other ways as well, participating in the
larger ambiguity between “real” objects and two-dimensional mirror representations, and
between spaces that project “forward” and those that recede “back,” found elsewhere in
the painting. To the left of the mirror, for example, is a row of stairs that lead up to the
orchestra in the top right corner of the painting. The sense of recession evoked by the
stairs moving “back” in space and by the parted curtain of the montoir is juxtaposed with
a sense of spatial projection evoked by the mirror reflecting space that is, so to speak, in
“front” of it. This triad of stairs, doorway, and mirror reflection constitute, I suggest, a
self-conscious commentary on painting’s long-standing interest in creating the illusion
of three-dimensionality and spatial fullness. Here, however, three-dimensionality is ren-
dered as a kind of trivial, somewhat confounding, illusion, rather than being created in the
service of substantive, meaningful ends. Directly below the mirror is another perplexing
form, namely, the yellow zigzag in the montoir, just to the right of the parted gardine. It
is disconnected from anything in its immediate vicinity and closely resembles the ribbon
that flutters behind the horseback rider, and we try to make sense of it by considering the
possibility that it too, like the white arc just above it, is a mirror reflection, in this case,
of part of the rider’s costume. This hypothesis, however, creates more problems than it
solves, since it would mean that the entire montoir and gardine are actually mirror reflec-
tions. Could the montoir in the background represent not a cut through which one moves
back in space but rather a mirror reflection of something in front of it, perhaps the curtain
and an unpictured entrance or exit in the immediate foreground of the painting? Or is it
somehow the other way around, with the curtain in the foreground a mirror reflection of
the one in the background?
Whatever cognitive moves we make, then, to decipher these individual parts of the
painting and to create a rational, unified whole out of them can only be partially success-
ful. If parts of the picture can, with time and cognitive effort, be made sense of, other parts

152 seductive sights


FIGURE 94
Georges Seurat, Aman-Jean as
Pierrot, c. 1883. Oil on wood, 10 ×
61/2 in. (25.4 × 16.5 cm). Private
collection.
of it defy reason and instead, like the circus itself, offer the pleasures of being confounded
and enthralled by our object of sight. One option is to cease our efforts to make sense of
what we see and, instead, fix our gaze on the horseback rider as she floats weightlessly
in midair, giving ourselves over to the seductive allure of her performance. Or, as one
contemporary commentator wrote about a female horseback acrobat, comparing her to a
dazzling retinal afterimage of pure sensation: “She passes again and again with the rapid-
ity of lightning. . . . The vision having disappeared, your retina retains the sensation of an
extinguished meteor. Public, submit to it.”56
And yet, here, too, as in Parade, the self-reflexive motifs and the various parts of the
painting offer the viewer the possibility of a more self-aware and cognitively active mode
of looking, one that partially distances Seurat’s viewers from the spectators in the work
and that differentiates Seurat’s painting from the spectacle that it depicts. Indeed, the
clown and curtain in the foreground are placed between the viewers of Seurat’s picture
and the represented spectators, preventing the seamless integration of the viewer into the
circus audience. This clown, who presides grandly over the entire painting, is positioned
at the threshold between the world of the circus and the one outside of it. As a clown, his
appeal to the audience rests on the defiance of reason and sense. As an 1889 text on French
circuses characterizes the essence of the clown’s act, “As for my pantomime, if I want it
to succeed, it should, through the incoherence of its actions, the jerkiness of its gestures
without nuance, and the automatism of its movements, offer a terrible spectacle of mad-
ness.”57 As such, the clown symbolizes the particular kind of pleasure one experiences in
witnessing the inexplicable and unintelligible. But Seurat’s clown is a double figure, both
a part of and apart from the world depicted. Clasping the edge of a curtain in his sur-
prisingly lifelike right hand, as if pulling it aside to reveal the spectacle to the viewer, he
reminds one, as others have also argued, of an artist standing in front of his canvas, brush
in hand as he works on it or unveiling his completed creation to his viewers. As the artist,
he serves as a reminder to the viewer of the difference between them and the spectators in
the painting, between what it means to look at a painting and what it is to go to the circus.
And, finally, this clown calls to mind the painted sketches that Seurat produced not quite
a decade before, at the earliest moments of his career, of his friend and fellow art student
Edmond Aman-Jean as Pierrot (fig. 94). In all these ways, then, Circus stands as a fitting
conclusion to Seurat’s body of figural paintings and to his career, come full circle.

153 seductive sights

 4 Sight and Touch in Black and White

The painter’s hand is useless, trickery is impossible. . . . Let the hand be numb, but let
the eye be agile, perceptive, and knowing.
—Félix Fénéon, 1886

Of the more than two hundred surviving drawings that Seurat produced over the course
of his career, two are of visual artists at work: one is of his friend Edmond Aman-Jean,
which was shown in the Salon of 1883, and the other is of an unidentified artist, perhaps
Seurat himself, which was never exhibited and is now referred to as Painter at Work (figs.
95, 96).1 I begin with these two drawings not just because they are the only renderings by
Seurat of the act of artistic production, but also because they manifest many of the qual-
ities and concerns that define his larger body of drawings. Like a significant portion of
Seurat’s work in this medium, both drawings are of single figures. With the objects of their
attention inaccessible to us, our focus is held by the figures themselves and, more specifi-
cally, by the postures, movements, and gestures required by the activity at hand. And in
both pictures, the relationship between the work of the eye and the hand immediately
comes to the fore. In the portrait of Aman-Jean, sight and touch work in close coordi-
nation, the gentle curve of the figure’s back as he leans in to look at his canvas rhyming
with the diagonal of the artist’s hand. In Painter at Work, the artist’s arm and hand reach
forward toward his picture, while his head and shoulders are pulled back from it. The
relationship between the sight and touch of the artist is thus presented somewhat opposi-
tionally in the second drawing, with the proximity required by the hand to make its marks
at odds with the distance required by the gaze to take in the picture. The slight torque in
the figure’s posture speaks not only to the importance of the physical position of the body
in relation to the object of sight for perception more generally; the forward-backward
split between the artist’s hands and gaze also reflects the distinct vantage points required
for looking at Neo-Impressionist painting, which was supposed to occur, at least partially,
at a distance, and for producing the paintings, which demanded proximity.
In both drawings, a distinct sense of spatial intimacy is evoked, through not only the
DETAIL OF FIGURE 131 confined nature of the depicted spaces but also the proximate relationship of each artist
FIGURE 95
Georges Seurat, Aman-Jean, 1882–
83. Conté crayon, 241/2 × 1811/16 in.
(62.2 × 47.5 cm). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Bequest
of Stephen C. Clark, 1960
(61.101.16).
FIGURE 96
Georges Seurat, Painter at Work,
c. 1884. Conté crayon on tan laid
paper, sheet (irregular): 121/4 × 91/8
in. (31.1 × 23.2 cm). The Philadel-
phia Museum of Art. A. E. Gallatin
Collection, 1952 (1952–61–118).
156
to the object of his attention. The artists’ nearness to their pictures mirrors that of Seurat
as he worked on the drawings, as well as that of the viewer looking at these works. Unlike
Neo-Impressionist painting, the small scale of Seurat’s drawings—most of them measure
about nine by twelve inches—necessitates that they be looked at from very close up. And
many of their features not only pull us in but also slow down our viewing process, imbu-
ing the world depicted in the drawings and our viewing experience of them with a sense
of temporal dilation. Thus, the sustained attention of the two depicted artists to their
work reflects our own study of Seurat’s drawings as we work (often slowly) to make out
the represented scene amidst the dense layer of black crayon marks on white paper.
Like almost all of Seurat’s work in this medium, both drawings were produced
with conté crayon, though his factural style is distinct in the two images. The portrait of
Aman-Jean is more finely finished, the individual strokes of crayon blended together into a
smooth and uniform surface, while the heavy scrawl of Painter at Work gives a less precise
rendering of its subject. The abundance of seemingly fervently applied strokes in Painter
at Work and Seurat’s preference for delineating tonal masses rather than contours force
the viewer to linger in front of the picture in order to decipher the forms that seem to only
ever partially cohere within the field of crayon. The rich conté crayon, the highly textured
sight and touch in black and white
 brand of paper that Seurat used, and the paper’s ragged and irregular edges keep the mate-
rial constituents of his drawings at the fore of the viewer’s attention. Similarly, the all-over
field of crayon marks in the two drawings makes the tactile aspect of the artistic process
palpably evident. The contrast between Seurat’s heavy working of the surface of the paper
in Painter at Work, in which the black crayon that articulates figure and space also threat-
ens to obscure the scene, and the erasure mark that paradoxically renders the sitter’s collar
in Aman-Jean succinctly conveys the terms and oppositions that define Seurat’s work in
drawing more broadly: vision and its occlusion, light and darkness as well as light and
matter, sight and touch, and the delineation and undoing of form.
As was typical for pictures in a more “minor” medium, Seurat’s drawings received
much less attention than did either his seascape or figural paintings, although he exhibited
them quite regularly alongside his paintings. But the critics who did discuss his drawings
were nearly unanimous in their high degree of admiration for them. “There is nevertheless
a genre,” wrote the prominent Symbolist writer Téodor de Wyzewa in his obituary for
the artist, “where it seems to me that Seurat realized all the qualities of his genius: I have
seen from him charcoals of a marvelous art, sober, luminous, living, the most expressive
that I know. . . . I recall that he treated them with disdain, as if he wanted one to transfer
the admiration that one felt for them to his painting.”2 For Wyzewa, Seurat’s drawings
constituted the fullest manifestation of the artist’s “genius,” possessing an expressiveness
that was also manifest in the artist’s seascapes, about which Wyzewa writes: “As for the
small landscapes that he left, he himself only saw them as studies. Several are charming,
lighter, finer than all the landscapes of today; but this finesse and this lightness, and the
delicate melancholy that accompanies them, this, I believe, is the product of the soul of
Seurat much more than of his methods and his theories.” That is, just as the drawings
were reflections of Seurat’s “genius,” Seurat’s landscapes were the products of the artist’s
“soul,” as opposed to the “methods and theories” that, presumably, defined his work in figu-
ral paintings.
Like Wyzewa, other critics also juxtaposed Seurat’s work in drawing and in paint-
ing, a comparative approach solicited by Seurat’s practice of frequently exhibiting the
two types of pictures alongside one another. And the terms with which critics articulated
this comparison are quite instructive. In a review of the 1888 Salon des Indépendants,
where eight of Seurat’s drawings hung next to Poseuses and Parade, one critic described
his reaction to the artist’s work as follows: “I always hesitate before a form of art that is
unknown to me, and I prefer to remain mute when I haven’t discovered the element of
interest that this new form should serve to exalt. This is why I will say almost nothing
about the exhibition of Seurat. . . . His drawings, however, seem to me to indicate in him
a real seer, and it is considering these that make me feel restrained before an art that is
still closed to me.”3 To this critic, Seurat’s drawings were an especially compelling part
of the artist’s œuvre, holding him in front of them as he tried to articulate their meaning
and effect. Another critic, after visiting a large Seurat retrospective held the year after his

157 sight and touch in black and white

 death, set the drawings in opposition to the paintings in more specific and explicit terms.
“Having signaled, last year . . . the danger of sacrificing to technique, my opinion from that
time became more intense when I once more saw Seurat’s canvases as an ensemble. What
aesthetic interest do these painted theorems present? What place will they hold among the
works of this time? . . . Fortunately, Seurat leaves several drawings of high value—like this
too little known portrait of Aman-Jean—drawings of effects obtained by the degradations
of tones and constructed so as to show an artist quivering within the technician.”4 In
contrast to Seurat’s paintings, characterized as “painted theorems” that lacked “aesthetic
interest,” the critic saw the less technique-driven, somehow more artistic drawings as
Seurat’s most significant artistic legacy. I, too, will pursue a comparative approach and sit-
uate these drawings in close relation to Seurat’s paintings, the discourses that surrounded
Neo-Impressionist painting, and, most of all, the concerns regarding visual experience
that I articulated in the previous three chapters. While many of Seurat’s drawings explore
the same issues regarding the conditions and limits of perception that he analyzed in his
paintings, they also serve as counterpoints to certain aspects of his painted pictures; in
them, the color and opticality of the paintings give way to a darker, more monochromatic,
and more tactile realm of perception and representation.
Previous art historical interpretations of Seurat’s drawings have tended to be driven
by chronological considerations, the consensus being that the vast majority of his inde-
pendent drawings were produced in the early 1880s, before he began his mature painting
practice. Accordingly, Seurat’s drawings have been closely identified with the early stages
of his artistic development that ostensibly culminated with his pointillist paintings. In
these accounts, the dark and light of the drawings helped Seurat to develop his notion of
contrast in painting, and the heavily textured white paper in concert with the black crayon
had a proto-pointillist effect.5 The notion that Seurat’s drawings occupy an important
place in the development of his pointillism and that they belong to the period that pre-
ceded his work in painting was also put forward by certain contemporary critics. Gustave
Kahn, for example, in his obituary for the artist, described the significance of Seurat’s
drawings as follows: “Rather discouraged in his pictorial attempts, because he had not yet
found his path . . . he took refuge in drawing. For some years he almost only worked in
black and white; he thus amassed a strong collection of notes; moreover, he found the pro-
cedure that he later applied to painting, he discovered it at least in an embryonic stage.”6
But there are several reasons to reconsider this chronologically grounded under-
standing of Seurat’s work in drawing. For one, very few of the drawings are dated, and
we know that Seurat continued to produce independent drawings through the late 1880s,
making it difficult to determine with absolute certainty when some of them were made.
But the more significant reason to revise our view of his production of drawings as largely
prior to and separate from his work in painting is Seurat’s regular practice of exhibiting
his drawings and paintings alongside one another. Not only does this create some doubt
about the conventional dating of some of these works to the early part of the decade; more

158 sight and touch in black and white

 importantly, and regardless of when they were actually produced, Seurat seems to have
wanted his drawings and paintings to be looked at, literally and metaphorically, next to
one another in the majority of shows in which he exhibited. It is for this reason that I have
departed from the scholarly norm of placing Seurat’s drawings at the beginning of a study
of his work. My interest in Seurat’s exhibition groupings and strategies, and my under-
standing of his drawings as working within and against the grain of his painting practice,
here outweigh chronological considerations.
Accordingly, I want to lay out certain central concepts in the critical discourse on
Neo-Impressionist painting that bear closely on Seurat’s drawings. One important theme
in some critical accounts was the relationship between sight and touch in the production
and viewing of Neo-Impressionist painting. For example, Félix Fénéon and, later, Paul
Signac were especially invested in promoting the notion of Neo-Impressionist painting
as a purely optical realm of experience, divorced from any tactile and material associa-
tions. Fénéon wrote in his June 1886 essay on Neo-Impressionism, “his huge painting, The
Grande Jatte, in whatever part one examines it, spreads out, a monotonous and patient
spotted tapestry: here, in effect, the painter’s hand is useless, trickery is impossible. . . . Let
the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perceptive, and knowing.”7 Fénéon’s praise
for the acuity of the Neo-Impressionist painter’s sight is preceded by a devaluing of the
haptic aspects of production, disconnecting the “perceptive, knowing” eye of the artist
from the “numb” hand that actually makes the painting. This foregrounding of the optical
components of pointillist painting also runs throughout Signac’s 1899 book, in which he
writes, for example, “the optical mixture of small, colored touches, placed methodically
one beside the other, leaves but little room for skill or virtuosity; the hand is of very little
importance, only the brain and the eye of the painter have a part to play.”8 The privileging
of sight over touch in relation to Neo-Impressionist painting by Fénéon and Signac is
accompanied by a rhetorical splitting of color from the materiality of pigment, a key fea-
ture of Signac’s writing in particular. Indeed, much of the account of Neo-Impressionism
in his book rests on the distinction between the pigmentary versus optical mixture
of colors. For example, when describing (in the third person) his incorporation of the
theory of optical mixture into his work, Signac wrote: “When these two elements were
opposites, such as red and green, or blue and orange, they blended to form a dull, soiled
pigmentary mixture. His disgust with these blemishes led him inevitably, step by step, to
the separation of the elements into distinct touches, that is, to optical mixing, which offers
the only means of shading two opposite colors into one another, without tarnishing their
purity.”9 Signac’s characterization of pigments as “soiled” “blemishes” that elicit his “dis-
gust” when mixed together contrasts them with the “purity” of color that is experienced
as an entirely optical phenomenon. His discussion of Impressionist technique elsewhere
in the book similarly conveys his distaste for the materiality of colored pigment: “In the
cheerful abandon to their rapid execution, an orange touch collides with a touch of blue
which is still fresh, a slash of green crosses madder which is still not dry, violet sweeps

159 sight and touch in black and white

 over yellow, and this repeated mixing of opposing molecules spreads over the canvas a
gray which is neither optical nor delicate, but pigmentary and dull, and which singularly
diminishes the brilliance of their painting.”10 For Signac, the problem with the supposed
haste of the Impressionists’ procedures was that it didn’t give the fresh paint time to dry.
Instead, the painters worked with wet paints that were vulnerable, as mutable matter, to
adulteration. His aversion to the visible materiality of Impressionist paintings is expressed
through his criticism of their overly tactile, physical processes of paint application, where
“touch[es] collide,” and where “slashes” of paint are thrown onto the canvas. Throughout
his book, Signac repeatedly analogizes pigment and pigmentary mixtures to “muck” and
“mud,” describing them as “dirty,” “lifeless,” and “dead,” unambiguously communicating
his antipathy toward the material components of painting. The assertion that the Neo-
Impressionists’ paintings needed to be looked at from a distance can also be seen as part of
Fénéon’s and Signac’s minimizing of the tactile and material elements of the pictures.11 “To
achieve optical mixture,” Signac explained, “the Neo-Impressionists have been obliged to
use small strokes, so that the diverse elements, observed at a proper distance, will re-cre-
ate the desired hues, and no longer be perceived in isolation.”12 Essential to the theory of
optical mixture was the requirement that pointillist paintings be viewed at a sufficient
distance for the individual dots of pigment to be almost imperceptible, their colors blend-
ing together in the eye of the viewer. But Signac’s repeated insistence on a distanced
viewing position wasn’t just due to the ostensible demands of optical mixture, nor to his
evident desire to render the much criticized pointillist mark less noticeable to the viewer.
Fénéon’s and Signac’s frequent commands for the viewer of Neo-Impressionist paintings
to take up a distant viewing position should also be understood in relation to their efforts
to downplay the material and tactile elements of the paintings themselves and of the expe-
riences of producing or looking at them.
Another prominent theme in the critical reception of the movement that is import-
ant for understanding Seurat’s drawings was the widespread lament of the impersonality
of Neo-Impressionist painting. The supposed uniformity of pointillist marks, combined
with the perception that the same style was shared by all the members of the group,
left no place for the expression of individuality in their work, some complained. Jules
Desclozeaux, for example, argued that “all of these canvases, not very independent, [are]
composed according to a rather narrow ritual in a manner that is too uniform and too
impersonal in general.” Likewise, another critic wrote, “What do we say about Albert,
Signac, Dubois-Pillet? All of these artists follow one another and resemble one another,
alas!” “Pass through their entire room,” stated Alfred Paulet in an 1888 review of the Salon
des Indépendants, “and you will see the uniformity of manner. Here are painters of whom
not one, perhaps, has the same way of feeling as another, and nevertheless their work
always has the same appearance.” Another critic characterized pointillism in very similar
terms when he defined it as “the eternal dish of lentils, multicolored and mathemati-
cally contrasted, for which they would sacrifice their rights of inheritance.” One writer

160 sight and touch in black and white

 succinctly summed up this common critique of Neo-Impressionism when he wrote that
there are “those who claim that all pointillist paintings seem to come from the same ‘fac-
tory.’”13 According to these critics, then, the pointillist method of painting entailed the
renunciation of the autographic mark, preventing viewers from being able to identify
the particular artist who produced the work. Indeed, it is in just these terms that George
Moore described his first experience seeing an exhibition of Neo-Impressionist paintings
in his 1893 book, Modern Painting. “The pictures were hung low, so I went down on my
knees and examined the dotting in the pictures signed Seurat, and the dotting in those that
were signed Pissarro. After a strict examination I was able to detect some differences, and
I began to recognize the well-known touch even through this most wild and most won-
derful transformation. Yes, owing to a long and intimate acquaintance with Pissarro and
his work, I could distinguish between him and Seurat, but to the ordinary visitor their pic-
tures were identical.”14 And Camille Pissarro himself explained his eventual abandonment
of the Neo-Impressionist technique in the mid-1890s as an attempt, in part, to reinvest his
work with individuality. Writing to Henry van de Velde in 1896, Pissarro stated, “Having
found out after many attempts . . . that it was impossible to give an individual character to
my drawing, I had to give it up.” While many critics were willing to concede that Seurat
possessed a great deal of talent, they believed that his commitment to scientific theories
and systematic methods of artistic production stymied the individuality and expressive-
ness of his work. “An overly narrow technique certainly stiffens him,” one such critic
wrote of Seurat, “and compromises the free flight of his temperament—the only really
interesting thing in art.”15
The primacy of sight divorced from touch, the devaluing of the work of the hand,
the denigration of the material elements of the painting, the uniformity and impersonality
of the artistic mark and, lastly, the necessity of viewing the works from a distance—these
are some of the central tenets of the critical discourse on Neo-Impressionist painting.
In previous chapters, I discussed at length the various ways in which Seurat’s paintings
run counter to the ideal of dematerialized, decorporealized opticality that runs through
Fénéon’s and Signac’s writings. The same is true for Seurat’s drawings, which seem in
certain respects to represent a deliberate defiance of the model of perception and pictorial
representation articulated by Fénéon and Signac, among others. The very small scale of
the drawings, the gestural and material marks that make up many of them, and the consis-
tent foregrounding of the relationship between sight and touch on the level of both form
and content are just a few of the ways that Seurat’s drawings seem distinctly at odds with
particular aspects of the discourse surrounding Neo-Impressionist painting. Here, I want
to explore the specific terms of these drawings and situate them in relation to the para-
digms of visual experience and modes of being put forward by Seurat in his paintings and
that I’ve elaborated throughout the book.
If, as many critics suggested, the uniform pointillist mark rendered Neo-
Impressionist paintings impersonal, the product of a “numb” hand, as Fénéon put it,

161 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 97
Georges Seurat, Woman in a
Carriage, c. 1883. Conté crayon,
12 × 91/4 in. (30.5 × 23.5 cm). Private
collection.
FIGURE 98
Georges Seurat, On the Balcony,
1882–83. Conté crayon, 12 × 93/8 in.
(31 × 24 cm). Musée du Louvre,
Paris.
162
Seurat’s drawings manifest a very different, much more animated method of mark-making.
As distinct from the paintings, the radically smaller size of the drawings elicits a more
physically intimate vantage point, from which the abundant marks that constitute so many
of Seurat’s drawings are all the more visible. In such drawings, for example, as Woman in a
Carriage and On the Balcony, among many of the drawings I will discuss, the movements of
Seurat’s hand are clearly indexed by the profusion of vigorously applied strokes of crayon
across the entire surface of the paper (figs. 97, 98). Nothing, it seems, could be further from
his painstaking and methodical application of minute dots of pigment to his canvases
than the kind of scrawl seen in a large number of the drawings. Indeed, it is precisely in
terms of the contrast between the “mechanical” and uniform facture of his paintings and
the more varied surfaces of his drawings that certain critics articulated their preference
for the latter. “Doesn’t one have the right to be a bit afraid,” wrote Roger Marx about Neo-
Impressionist painting, “of this new mode of painting that one achieves by scientific anal-
ysis, that is, by what is most opposed to art? . . . I will always regret that the artist decided
not to exhibit, besides his very curious paintings, several of his drawings. How much
easier it would be for Seurat to be treated fairly if, next to his seascapes that have a happy
effect, but are of a single facture, one saw from him an interior scene or a portrait in char-
coal—that of Aman-Jean, for example, which is incontestably a masterful page.”16
sight and touch in black and white
 Seurat’s choice of drawing materials helps to highlight not only the physical pro-
cess by which these pictures came into being, but also the material components of these
works. With few exceptions, Seurat’s drawings were produced using conté crayon, a
combination of graphite and clay that is both soft enough to register every move of the
artist’s hand and waxy enough to maintain the integrity of each mark, unlike charcoal or
pastel, in which the powderiness of the medium makes the marks merge more easily with
one another and with the paper support. The brand of paper that Seurat used, Michallet,
is a highly textured rag paper whose uneven surface draws the viewer’s attention to the
material nature of the work itself and which was often used by Seurat to evoke a material
element in the depicted scene. Thus, in stark contrast to some of the rhetoric surrounding
his Neo-Impressionist paintings, Seurat’s drawings foreground the tactile and material
dimensions of the artistic process, of the scene represented in the pictures, and of the
works themselves. But, in many instances, the accretion of crayon marks as Seurat works
the surface of the paper not only obscures individual strokes, but threatens the very legi-
bility of the image. Looking more closely at drawings such as Woman in a Carriage, we see
how the build-up of crayon on the paper undermines the intelligibility of the forms, leav-
ing only the most general outline of the woman’s head and body perceptible. The crayon
is thus used by Seurat to articulate the figure and the surrounding space and to partially
obscure them, suggesting that the very process of drawing can efface form as much as
it can create it. This notion of the crayon as the means by which form is delineated and
obscured is made plain in this drawing by the much less marked rectangle of paper in the
upper left corner. Representing a window through which enters the light that makes the
woman faintly visible, this relatively bare rectangle demonstrates that crayon can either
enable or prevent the perception of form and space in drawing. Along these lines, Woman
in a Carriage also illustrates the complex interplay between the senses of sight and touch
of the artist. The most heavily scrawled parts of the drawing, those in which the work
of the hand is most evident, are the least visually legible, obscured by the smothering
blackness of the crayon marks, whereas the source of illumination in this scene is a rather
untouched aperture in the upper left corner. Light and darkness, sight and touch, percep-
tibility and imperceptibility are some of the pairs of terms around which Seurat’s draw-
ings are built, in which each half of the pair is inextricably tied to but also often in tension
with the other.17
Other drawings by Seurat, such as View through a Balcony Railing, also feature the
motif of the window to explore the conditions of visibility and to unsettle the fictional
transparency of the paper as it oscillates between clear picture plane and opaque material
object (fig. 99). Here again, the crayon marks that represent the dark curtains on the right
and left sides of the drawing emphasize the occlusion of vision, while the central portion
of the drawing, by contrast, represents the view through the balcony and beyond. The sup-
port is thus both a transparent plane, like a window, and an opaque object, like a curtain,
and is both a representation and a material thing in itself. As we peer between the thick

163 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 99
Georges Seurat, View through a
Balcony Railing, 1883–84. Conté
crayon on paper, 123/4 × 93/4 in.
(32.4 × 24.7 cm). Private
collection.
164
curtains through the window and balcony, we glimpse the flicker of bright spots of light in
the night. These bursts of light self-reflexively double the shimmering of the bright white
paper visible through the blackness of the crayon in many of Seurat’s drawings. It is this
shimmer that Gustave Geffroy alluded to when he described Seurat’s drawings as creat-
ing “a black atmosphere, violently lit in places as if by a snowfall.”18 Not only does Geffroy
note the way that Seurat’s drawings are dominated by darkness, but his metaphor of the
snowfall beautifully describes the flicker created by the white paper and black crayon that
one often perceives when looking at the drawings. In them, white and light can sometimes
produce the same slightly dizzying occlusion of vision that one experiences during a
snowfall. A related image in which fabric creates the partial obstruction of light and vision,
and whose subject explicitly evokes the issue of the limits of sight, is a drawing called The
Veil (fig. 100). With the female figure’s eyes partially covered by material and the surface of
the paper almost entirely darkened by crayon strokes, few drawings by Seurat so directly
convey his interest in the fundamental contingency of sight. Here, the marks themselves
are presented as a kind of veil, obscuring as well as articulating form and light, function-
ing as a screen or filter that can only partially be visually penetrated.
sight and touch in black and white
 An especially compelling example of Seurat aligning the surface of the paper with
a representation of material fabric is a drawing referred to as Skirt, made in preparation
for the Grande Jatte (fig. 101). Produced as a study for the bustled skirt of the woman in the
right foreground of the painting, this drawing of fabric recalls the training that students,
including Seurat, received at the École des Beaux-Arts in the depiction of draped cloth.
But Skirt couldn’t be further from the carefully rendered, chiaroscural drawings of drapery
that Seurat produced in his student days. Indeed, Skirt is not so much a drawing as it is an
almost literal transformation of the ripples of the paper’s surface into the weave, creases,
and folds of an item of clothing. As a visual representation, the drawing is almost com-
pletely illegible; instead, Seurat employs the material properties of the paper to evoke the
subject and, in so doing, underscores the material reality of the drawing itself.
In other drawings by Seurat, the question of the relationship between sight and
touch is expanded into a related query concerning the ways that the hand and eye work in
relation to one another in the performance of everyday activities. Indeed, Seurat demon-
strated a marked tendency to depict the single figure engaged in an array of seemingly
disparate and ordinary activities: house painting, a woman opening a parasol, a man
polishing shoes, driving a carriage, or street sweeping, to name just a few (figs. 102–105).
All of the subjects in these very spare, single-figure drawings have one feature in com-
mon, namely, their engagement in habitual activities in which the hands, mind, and eyes
work in semiconscious coordination. Seurat’s interest in rendering these kinds of activ-
ities and gestures over and over again encourages one to view these images somewhat
self-reflexively, that is, as recalling Seurat’s own drawing practice and the small, repeated

FIGURE 100
Georges Seurat, The Veil, c. 1883.
Conté crayon, 123/8 × 91/2 in. (31.5 ×
24.2 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris.

FIGURE 101
Georges Seurat, Skirt (Study for A
Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884),
1885. Conté crayon, 113/4 × 63/4 in.
(30 × 17 cm). Musée Picasso, Paris.

165 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 102
Georges Seurat, House Painter,
1883–84. Conté crayon on paper,
121/2 × 93/4 in. (31.8 × 24.9 cm).
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

FIGURE 103
Georges Seurat, Woman Opening
Parasol, 1884–86. Conté crayon on
Michallet paper, 121/2 × 93/4 in. (31.7
× 24.7 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel.
Kupferstichkabinett (1978.194).

FIGURE 104 FIGURE 105

Georges Seurat, Man Polishing Georges Seurat, Carriage Driver,
Shoes, 1884–86. Conté crayon on 1887–88. Conté crayon, 95/8 ×
paper, 63/4 × 43/4 in. (17 × 12 cm). 121/4 in. (24.5 × 31 cm). Location
Private collection. unknown.

166 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 106
Georges Seurat, Woman Sewing,
1882. Black crayon with metallic
silver paint and black chalk on tan
laid paper, 1211/16 × 95/8 in. (32.2 ×
24.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/
Fogg Museum, Cambridge.
Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop
(1943.919).
167
physical movements that it entailed. In his drawing House Painter, for example, the analogy
between the gestures of the depicted figure and those of Seurat seems quite explicit; the
vigorously applied, parallel strokes of conté crayon that constitute parts of the drawing
reflect the kinds of gestures and marks that are made by a house painter. Seurat thus sit-
uates his drawing practice as a form of physical work, the act of drawing defined, at least
in part, as a series of physical gestures and movements that require mental, tactile, and
visual coordination. Accordingly, I would argue that one of the functions of the profusion
of strokes in so many of Seurat’s drawings is to highlight the way in which the works were
brought into being by the very active manual gestures of the artist.
Seurat’s portraits of women sewing, knitting, embroidering, or reading constitute
a distinct subcategory of these kinds of drawings. Beginning with Woman Sewing, we
see a rather elegantly dressed woman quietly absorbed in handiwork (fig. 106). Her bent
head indicates the object of her focus, and her hands raise the fabric toward her face to
bring the material within her visual grasp. The tactile nature of the activity is reinforced
by the soft and lush black markings that cover the surface of the paper, in which visually
observed details give way at points to a more haptically perceived realm. Seurat’s delin-
eation of the folds and drape of her skirt in the lower area of the drawing constitutes
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 107
Georges Seurat, Embroidery, 1882–
83. Conté crayon on Michallet
paper, 125/16 × 97/16 in. (31.2 × 24.1
cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. Purchase, Joseph
Pulitzer Bequest, 1951; acquired
from The Museum of Modern Art,
Lillie P. Bliss Collection (55.21.1).
168
another example of his alignment of the surface of the drawing with depicted fabric. It is
an image of sustained and quiet focus, but one with a distinctly somatic quality, illustrat-
ing an experience that seems, in equal parts, visual, tactile, and cognitive.
Embroidery (Broderie), a portrait of Seurat’s mother that he unsuccessfully submitted
for exhibition in the 1883 Salon, likewise depicts a solitary woman engaged in handiwork
(fig. 107). Unlike Woman Sewing, here we see the figure’s face lowered in concentration, just
as we see the fingers of each hand as they work the fabric and thread and, thus, manual
gestures, visual attention, and mental focus are even more evidently joined here than in
the last image. The narrow range of lights and darks in the drawing, with the exception of
the small white patch of the collar under her chin, creates the impression, as in so many
of Seurat’s drawings, of the subject gradually emerging out of or receding into darkness
and imperceptibility. And it is the seemingly tenuous perceptibility of the represented
scene that, in part, imbues the drawing and our experience of looking at it with a sense of
temporal extension. In this drawing, visual perception is not a linear process resulting in
steadily increasing comprehension; rather, the scene seems both in the process of emerg-
ing into and receding out of sight, much as the drawing process entails the articulation
and obscuring of form on the paper.
sight and touch in black and white
 Seurat’s portrait of the writer and critic Paul Alexis is yet another example of the
artist’s rendering of a solitary figure engrossed in everyday acts that entail the cooperation
of the sitter’s visual, tactile, and cognitive capacities (fig. 108). The bespectacled figure is
shown hunched over the paper in the act of writing, with one hand clutching his writ-
ing instrument and the other holding the page in place. Writing, in this drawing, is not
a purely mental process of creation but a manually and visually engaging one as well. At
the bottom of the drawing, Seurat inscribed à paul alexis in very neatly printed capital
letters, exactly the same style of lettering he uses to sign his own name along the sheet’s
bottom right edge. This aligning of the artist’s signature with the name of the writer who

FIGURE 108
Georges Seurat, Paul Alexis. Conté
crayon, 117/8 × 91/8 in. (30 × 23 cm).
Location unknown. Reproduced in
La vie moderne, June 17, 1888;
Bibliothèque nationale de France.

169 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 109
Georges Seurat, Woman Reading
by Lamplight, 1882–84. Location
unknown.
is the subject of the drawing is perhaps meant to evoke the similarity between writing
and drawing as two processes that entail mark-making and signification. This work also
elicits a comparison between the different registers of writing and drawing by means of
which Paul Alexis is doubly represented—the iconic mode of this drawing and the sym-
bolic mode of language. And indeed, Seurat himself is also doubly represented, with his
printed name at the bottom of the page and the charcoal marks serving as two forms of
self-representation.
The blurring of the distinction between physical and cognitive work seen in
Embroidery and Paul Alexis is evident in many of Seurat’s other drawings as well and is
one that we might productively consider in relation to Seurat’s own drawing and paint-
ing practice. Woman Reading by Lamplight, another portrait of his mother, depicts her
absorbed in the act of reading (fig. 109). Seurat’s underscoring of his mother’s fleshy, volu-
minous hands clutching the book defines reading as being as much a somatic experience

170 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 110
Georges Seurat, Young Woman,
c. 1884–88. Black chalk on cream
wove paper, 12 × 93/16 in. (30.5 ×
23.3 cm), frame: 19 × 16 × 11/4 in.
(48.3 × 40.6 × 3.2 cm). Harvard Art
Museums/Fogg Museum,
Cambridge. Bequest from the
Collection of Maurice Wertheim,
Class of 1906 (1951.70).
171
that engages the hands and entails the coordination of eye and hand as it is a cognitive
activity that engages the mind. As in Embroidery, much of the scene is swallowed by dark-
ness, with only the face and hands of the figure, the object of the sitter’s attention, and the
lamp in the upper right corner visible. The drawing thus distills for the viewer the essen-
tial components of reading–hands, eyes, spectacles, book, and illuminating lamp–with
reading not only serving as a paradigm of the cooperation between the mind and the
senses but also illustrating the contingency of much of our experience on the conditions
and limits of vision.
As in Embroidery and Woman Reading by Lamplight, so too in other drawings does
Seurat seem to efface the distinction between ostensibly manual activities such as sewing
and knitting and seemingly purely cognitive ones such as reading. Young Woman ( Jeune
lle) depicts a young woman seated in a studio, her head bent down toward the book that
rests in her lap, the artist’s easel visible to the right (fig. 110). Her hand is poised over the
sight and touch in black and white
 object of her concentration in a way that recalls the drawing of Seurat’s mother reading,
his images of women sewing and embroidering, and his portrait of Aman-Jean painting
in his studio. The similarities among his multiple renderings of sitters reading, painting,
writing, and engaging in handicraft imply that Seurat viewed all of these activities as in
some way fundamentally alike. All of them, Seurat seems to be suggesting, require the
engagement of and cooperation between the hands, eyes, body, and mind of the subject,
illustrating precisely the mode of experience that Helmholtz argued was necessary for
making cognitive sense of our surroundings. As I argued in previous chapters, Seurat jux-
taposed this productive form of physical and mental engagement with the outside world
with a corporeally and cognitively passive state, in which the subject assumes a more
spectatorial relationship to external phenomena. It is the former mode of experience that
is almost everywhere illustrated in Seurat’s body of drawings, though the same opposition
between these two modes of being that is manifest in Seurat’s paintings is also created by
some of Seurat’s exhibition groupings of his drawings (as I discuss later in this chapter).
Seurat’s sustained consideration of the relationship between cognitive and corpo-
real activity bears directly on the issues of conception and execution in artistic theory
and practice broadly speaking, in Neo-Impressionist painting in particular, and even
more specifically in Seurat’s own practice. Earlier in this chapter, I cited Félix Fénéon’s
description of the Grande Jatte as a “patient spotted tapestry,” which was just one example
of the critics’ frequent comparisons of Neo-Impressionist paintings to mosaics, tapestries,
and various embroidered, sewn, or woven textiles. To give just a few examples, one critic
wrote that “the impressionists no longer paint, they decorate. Look at Signac, Angrand,
Cavallo-Peduzzi (a new one), Seurat, Lucien Pissaro [sic]. . . . What patience to end up with
these inlays! And what valuable models of tapestry for a boarding school of young girls!”
Another critic claimed that “their canvases [have] the appearance of tapestries au petit point
produced in sewing circles in the most remote provinces by young women possessing
the most elementary aesthetic,” while another remarked that Neo-Impressionist painting
“looks like a tapestry made by a patient and ignorant housewife.”19 These comparisons were
clearly intended to demean the paintings’ artistic value, aligning them with feminine craft
and decoration rather than with fine art. However, looking at Seurat’s many drawings of
female figures engaged in precisely this kind of manual work, one doubts that the charac-
terization of his pictures as women’s handiwork had the same negative connotations for
the artist.
Although many critics employed the analogy of Neo-Impressionist painting to tex-
tiles and tapestries, Fénéon was the only one to do so as a form of praise. For Fénéon, part
of the merit of Neo-Impressionist painting lay in its ostensible subordination of the work
of the hand to that of the painter’s eye. Accordingly, his comparison of Seurat’s paint-
ing to a tapestry was a means of commending the artist’s keen visual perception and his
minimizing of the importance of brushwork to his painting. “This spotting of the canvas,”
Fénéon wrote, “does not presuppose any manual skill, but only—oh! only—an artistic and

172 sight and touch in black and white

 practiced vision.”20 But regardless of whether the analogy of Neo-Impressionist paintings
to tapestries, mosaics, and the like was intended as an expression of approval or disap-
proval, in either case it associated pointillism with mere execution, as distinct and separate
from something akin to conception (or, in Fénéon’s case, visual perception). Beyond the
similarity in appearance between the stitches of a tapestry and the points of paint in Neo-
Impressionism, the analogy draws its force from the assumption that the production of
tapestry was a purely manual activity, devoid of the intellectual or conceptual components
that raise Art above the level of decoration. Fénéon, too, described the act of applying
paint to canvas as execution by a “numb hand,” as opposed, in his words, to the “knowing
eye” of the painter, the latter phrase directly associating visual perception with conception
or intellect. Signac would later characterize Neo-Impressionist painting very similarly,
writing that “only the brain and the eye of the painter have a part to play.”21 Thus, the
analogy of Neo-Impressionist paintings to tapestries consistently privileged conception
over execution and associated the pointillist technique with the latter. A few decades later,
Marcel Duchamp would articulate his understanding of Seurat’s painting in very much the
same way, characterizing him as an artist “who didn’t let his hand interfere with his mind.”
And it was Seurat’s separation of the work of the hand and that of the mind, Duchamp
suggested, that opened the way to his own radical splitting of conception and execution
and to his decision to “stop being a painter in the professional sense.”22
But do Fénéon’s and Duchamp’s views of the relationship between conception and
execution in Neo-Impressionist painting accord with those of Seurat? I would propose
that Seurat had a more integrated view of the relationship between the two than Fénéon,
Signac, Duchamp, and others did. In a letter that Seurat wrote to Fénéon in 1890, he
recounted information that he had provided to Jules Christophe for an article that the
critic was writing on him: “It is this that I did in relation to Mr. Christophe in giving him
a simple note of aesthetics followed by a general line on technique (that which I regard
as the mind and body of art). The two originalities.”23 Seurat’s statement could be seen to
confirm the dichotomy between conception, or “aesthetics,” which he equates with the
“mind,” and execution, or “technique,” which he aligns with the “body.” But his characteri-
zation of “aesthetics” and “technique” as “the two originalities” suggests his equal valuing
of the two. For Seurat, the relationship between conception and execution, or theory and
practice, thus seems to be one of complementarity, one that is repeatedly alluded to in
the drawings where sewing, writing, reading, and painting are rendered as fundamentally
similar experiences that all entail visual, manual, and mental coordination.
The critics’ disparagement of Neo-Impressionist painting as equivalent to various
kinds of handiwork was also meant to convey their concern about the supposed deperson-
alization and anonymity of pointillist facture. As I discussed earlier, the ostensible unifor-
mity of pointillism, combined with the systematic, scientific bent of Neo-Impressionism
more generally, caused many critics to perceive a loss of artistic subjectivity and individ-
uality in the paintings. One critic, writing the year after Seurat’s death, complained that

173 sight and touch in black and white

 “This was a painter. And yet, to see him proceeding so slowly, from deduction to deduction,
meticulous and infinitesimal, one would have thought him a geometrician. He held his
soul like a bird fluttering in his hand, and permitted it neither flight nor the beating of its
wings.”24 Some critics responded to the perceived breach between Seurat’s life and work
by rhetorically reuniting the two in ways that haven’t yet been discussed and that I want
to elaborate here. More specifically, in several accounts of the artist that appeared during
his life or shortly after his death in 1891, Seurat’s biography, appearance, and character
were described in terms that seemed to derive from his paintings, as critics worked back
from the art to the man in an attempt to establish a likeness between his pictures and the
individual that produced them. In one anonymous article, for example, Seurat was charac-
terized as “physically: a simple man, proper, thoughtful, with measured and precise speech,”
the latter terms almost identical to those used by many to describe his careful method of
paint application. The same writer also made a point of mentioning Seurat’s “implacably
resolute gaze,” drawing on the close association between Neo-Impressionist painting and
visual acuity.25 The singling out of Seurat’s gaze in terms that connect it to his style of
painting is even more explicit in his obituary by Gustave Kahn, who described Seurat as
having had “very large eyes, which were extraordinarily calm during the idle moments of
life, but when he was looking or painting, they narrowed, leaving visible only a luminous
point of the pupil under blinking eyelashes,” thereby directly tying Seurat’s physiognomy
to the artist’s pointillist paint mark.26
Somewhat paradoxically, some critics even tried to repair the supposedly missing
connection between the character of Seurat and his work by constructing an image of
the artist as devoid of interiority and particularity. In other words, since the art of Seurat
was perceived to be impersonal, his biography and personality were likewise purged of
specificity. The anonymous article of 1890, quoted above and entitled “Types of Artists,”
stated the following: “Since the procedures [of art], formerly instinctive, have become
scientific, and the methods of investigation have been made rigorous, the technique of
the arts, excluding all complicity with chance, demands assiduous labor and a constant
concentration of thought; a change has been produced, quite naturally, in the personality
of the artists, we mean to speak above all of French artists. The precision of the plastic
expression has determined, it seems, the correcting of individuality.” The example that the
writer gave of this kind of artist was none other than Seurat. The desire to see Seurat’s
work as reflective of his biography or personality, and thus the crafting of a biography
that matched his seemingly impersonal paintings, can be seen in several early texts about
the artist. In Kahn’s obituary for him, for example, the writer claimed that “the biography
of Georges Seurat is flat, and devoid of picturesque events.”27 But as I discussed in the
previous chapter, the artist’s relationship with Madeleine Knoblock is evidence that his
personal life was much more compelling than Kahn and others would have had their read-
ers believe.

174 sight and touch in black and white

 Another related feature of the biographical writings on Seurat was the repeated
claim that his devotion to his art displaced any other pursuits or interests. Claiming that
Seurat was wholly constituted by his work was one more way that critics vacated him
of subjectivity, thereby creating a likeness between him and his ostensibly impersonal
paintings. Jules Antoine, for example, wrote in his obituary for the artist that “his life, too
short, scarcely entailed any incidents; it consisted entirely of work and experiments.” In
several instances, critics went so far as to liken Seurat to a monk or martyr whose artis-
tic practice constituted a form of self-sacrifice. Alphonse Germain, for one, described
Seurat as an artist who was “gifted with an irresistible will, the courage of a believer, and
the patience of a monk.” “At an age when most are starved for success,” Germain wrote,
“he, nobly, simply, with his calm faith, practiced self-denial for his art, embarking on the
work of a Benedictine monk in order to enrich it. . . . He gave his all to his work.” Arsène
Alexandre described Seurat in much the same terms when he wrote that the artist “worked
with furious energy of which one has no idea, cloistering himself in a small studio on the
boulevard Clichy, living in total privation, spending his very meager allowance exclusively
for the benefit of his expensive work.”28 These characterizations of Seurat as a monk, or
as one who lived in a “cloister,” frame his artistic practice as a form of self-denial and self-
sacrifice and void him of any other qualities or attributes.
The drawings, “which reveal a Seurat too little known,” as Germain said, are another
matter altogether, evincing a sense of intimacy and proximity on the levels of form, tech-
nique, affect, and subject matter. As Gustave Kahn wrote in his introduction to a catalogue
of Seurat’s drawings, “the interesting thing is that, in going through this mass of drawings,
one finds no influences. They are completely personal.”29 This sense of intimacy is most
concretely manifest in the personal nature of some of the subjects that Seurat depicted,
using the realm of drawing to portray the world of family, friends, and colleagues. The
first two works that Seurat ever submitted for exhibition were drawings of his mother
and of his close friend Aman-Jean, thus tying his drawings to his private sphere from the
very earliest point in his career (see figs. 95 and 107). I have already discussed the many
drawings of his mother and aunt sewing, embroidering, and reading in the Seurat family
home. In addition to these portraits and those of Aman-Jean and Paul Alexis, Seurat pro-
duced other drawings of friends, family members, and scenes from his private life. In the
1886 Impressionist exhibition, where Seurat made his debut as a Neo-Impressionist, he
exhibited a drawing listed as Condolences (Condoléances) (fig. 111). It shows a group of three
women and one man who, the title suggests, are gathered for a funerary occasion, a subject
that speaks directly to the private realm of family and friends. But the drawing doesn’t
image a generic private occasion; it is most likely a depiction of the funeral of Seurat’s
grandmother, and the male figure in the drawing appears to be Seurat himself. The scene
is thus an autobiographical one, and the decision to exhibit it at such a major exhibition
is a surprising one for an artist who was notoriously guarded and private. Furthermore,

175 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 111
Georges Seurat, Condolences,
1885–86. Conté crayon on paper,
91/2 × 121/2 in. (24.1 × 31.8 cm).
Private collection.

FIGURE 112
Georges Seurat, Anaïs Faivre
Haumonté on Her Deathbed, 1887.
Conté crayon and gouache on
paper, 9 × 13 in. (23 × 33 cm).
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
 the scene of quiet conversation among the small group of figures depicted in Condolences
stands in contrast to the absence of social interaction in the Grande Jatte, alongside of
which Condolences was exhibited. The drawing also manifests a much more immediate
mode of execution than the pointillist paintings that hung right next to it. Perhaps his
drawings do indeed reveal a glimpse of “a Seurat too little known.”
Seurat’s depiction of familial loss includes another even more intimate drawing,
one of his aunt on her deathbed that he gave to her children after she died (fig. 112). She
was Seurat’s maternal aunt, and she had spent a great deal of time in the Seurat household
when the artist was growing up. She and Seurat’s mother were extremely close, and his
aunt came to live with them after the death of her husband. In the drawing, her head is
turned toward Seurat as he draws her for what was likely the last time, though her face
is partially elided, perhaps in order to give the sitter a measure of privacy, or perhaps an
indication of the emotional difficulty of executing this portrait. The room is bathed in can-
dlelight, the white flames highlighted with touches of white gouache. The themes of light
and darkness, the perceptible and the imperceptible, and light and matter that permeate
Seurat’s drawings here take on distinctly metaphysical meaning. But if the candles and
cross represent spiritual forms of consolation in this deathbed scene, Seurat’s delineation
of the way his aunt’s head sinks into the large pillows beneath it and of the thick folds of
the blanket that covers her conveys a specifically somatic kind of comfort.
Images of Seurat’s immediate family also include drawings of a man presumed to be
his father, quite distinct from the manner and style in which he depicted his mother. Man
Dining (Dîneur), which Seurat exhibited in the 1888 Salon des Indépendants, is ostensibly a
portrait of his father during a meal, though the face of the subject is indicated by only the
barest of details (fig. 113). Instead, Seurat represents his father by emphasizing the physical
mass and weight of his body in space. The drawing presents eating as the consummate
corporeal activity and is thus another example of Seurat’s emphasis on the physicality
of everyday activities. This work is one of the few that Seurat signed, and he did so in a
manner that exactly matches the loose scrawl of the drawing itself. The aligning of his sig-
nature with the graphic marks representing the figure associates the activities of the sitter
and the artist (just as the much more neatly printed signature at the bottom edge of Paul
Alexis’s portrait aligns drawing with the act of writing) and, thus, again underscores the
physical aspects of his own drawing practice.
As with his small painted sketches on wood, Seurat would sometimes give his draw-
ings to family, friends, colleagues, and supportive critics. It seems likely, for example, that
Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose ownership of Condolences was indicated in the catalogue of
the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, and writer Robert Caze, whose possession of a draw-
ing called The Fair Performer (La banquiste) (see fig. 126) was also listed in that catalogue,
acquired the drawings as gifts rather than through purchase.30 Portraits by Seurat of those
close to him were certainly given as gifts: Seurat’s portrait of Aman-Jean was given to the
sitter after it was exhibited in the Salon; his rendering of his aunt on her deathbed was

177 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 113
Georges Seurat, Man Dining,
1883–84. Conté crayon on paper,
121/8 × 85/8 in. (30.8 × 21.9 cm).
Private collection.
FIGURE 114
Georges Seurat, Woman with
Black Bow, c. 1882. Conté crayon,
123/8 × 95/8 in. (31.5 × 24.5 cm).
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
178
given by Seurat to her children; his portrait of Signac (see fig. 136) was given to his col-
league in 1890 or 1891; and, of course, the inscription at the bottom of the portrait of Paul
Alexis testifies to the drawing being a gift to the sitter. Though Seurat’s mother received a
good portion of his estate after his death, thereby making it difficult to determine which
of his works were in her possession while Seurat was still alive, it seems likely that at least
some of his portraits of her were given to her as gifts as well. Thus Seurat’s smaller-scaled
works, his painted croquetons and drawings, functioned not just as objects of public exhi-
bition but also as private gifts, given as gestures of friendship, love, or appreciation to
his supporters.
But the intimacy of Seurat’s drawings is found not just in the personal nature of
some of his subjects, nor in their status as gifts. More fundamentally, I would propose
that these works are defined by what one might call a structure of intimacy—by their
small scale, by Seurat’s technique and use of materials, by the viewing experience that
they create, and so on. All of these features of the drawings account, for example, for the
sense of intimacy exuded by Seurat’s many drawings of anonymous figures, although they
were likely encountered in public spaces and observed by Seurat from something of a dis-
tance. Indeed, the distinction between interior and exterior is elided in many of Seurat’s
sight and touch in black and white
 drawings of single figures; even those depicted in what are likely public or outdoor spaces
are depicted as if from quite close up, often alone, and with the figure enveloped in a
completely still atmosphere, making clear that it was only the figures and their activities,
not the larger scene of which they were a part, that were of interest to the artist. One espe-
cially well-known example is Woman with Black Bow (fig. 114). We see again Seurat’s close
engagement with the delineation of clothing and fabric, creating a parallel between the
tactile and material aspects of his drawings and that of the fabrics depicted. In no sense
can this be considered a conventional portrait, with the figure’s face bent down and turned
away from the viewer, who only sees her from the back. But Seurat’s singling out of this
figure for his attention invests the subject with a kind of significance that renders her as
something more than an anonymous woman glimpsed on the street. Situated in an atmo-
sphere in which time, movement, and sound have been suspended, the viewer is compelled
to attend to the drawing with the same sustained focus that the artist himself devoted to it.
Looking back for a moment at Seurat’s drawing of a man polishing another’s shoes
(see fig. 104), one can’t help but recall a picture of the same subject from nearly half a cen-
tury earlier, Daguerre’s renowned 1838 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple (fig. 115).
The exposure time was too long for this early photograph to capture any of the traffic or
people at the site, except for one figure who happened to be having his shoes shined and
who thus stood still long enough to be photographically captured, likely making him one

FIGURE 115
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre,
detail of Boulevard du Temple,
1838. Bayerisches National-
museum, Munich.

179 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 116
Georges Seurat, Café Singer, 1887–
88. Crayon and scalpel on Gillot
paper, 123/4 × 61/2 in. (32.3 × 17 cm).
Private collection.
180
of the first people ever to be photographed. This photograph, and the single clearly repre-
sented figure in it, foreground the conditions and limits of perception and representation,
situating them in the context of temporal extension, since the standing figure needed to
remain motionless long enough to be registered in the photograph. Whether Seurat him-
self thought of this photograph when he produced his drawing we cannot know, but the
similarity between them productively opens out onto a consideration of Seurat’s drawings
in relation to photography, with one specific work, Café Singer, explicitly connecting the
two (fig. 116). Rather than using the usual Michallet paper as the support for the work,
Seurat instead chose something called Gillot paper, which was a type of paper used for
photographic reproduction. The kind that Seurat used was covered in white pigment, on
top of which he applied the black conté crayon and then scraped some of the crayon and
pigment off of the paper.31 This picture thus joins Seurat’s drawing to both photography
and printmaking, and suggests the possibility of the artist’s broader interest in the rela-
tionship between these various media. Along these lines, Gustave Kahn once characterized
Seurat’s drawings as “done not so much for line as for the atmosphere,” a description that
emphasizes Seurat’s tonal, rather than linear, articulation of form in these works, one that
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 117
Georges Seurat, The Artist’s
Mother, c. 1882–83. Conté crayon
on Michallet paper, 12 × 93/16 in.
(30.5 × 23.3 cm). The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.
181
is very similar to photographic tonality.32 Indeed, it is difficult to look at Seurat’s body of
drawings over a period of time without realizing the similarities between the issues at
work in some of them and those that define the photographic medium, such as the ways
that our perception of the world is conditioned by the play of light on matter and through
space, shining on and through various transparent and opaque surfaces.
Likewise, many of the drawings that I have analyzed present the flux between light
and dark as forming the very parameters of perception and representation, and the vary-
ing degrees of light falling on (and sometimes through) different objects as constituting
the basic conditions of perceptibility. Woman Reading by Lamplight (see fig. 109) is just
one example of Seurat’s interest in rendering the select diffusion of light across different
surfaces, in this case the sitter’s face, hands, and book, and in showing the way that light
differentiates objects from the surrounding darkness. The same is true for Embroidery (see
fig. 107), in which the subject of the drawing seems to be as much the light that grazes, to
varying degrees, the top of the sitter’s head, the white ruffle at her neck, and the top half of
her fingers as they work the fabric, as it is the sitter herself. And nowhere is Seurat’s evo-
cation of the contingency of vision or the slow emergence and recession of objects in and
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 118
Georges Seurat, Reading, 1886–88.
Conté crayon and white gouache
on paper, 121/4 × 93/8 in. (31 × 24 cm).
Private collection.
182
out of darkness as explicit as it is in a remarkable portrait of his mother, the drawing The
Artist’s Mother (fig. 117). Her features literally seem to be in the process of slowly coming
into view out of the undifferentiated surrounding space in a manner highly reminiscent of
the emergence of the photographic image during the development process.
In other drawings, Seurat’s depictions of windows, doors, and balconies seem to
serve primarily as illustrations of the way light can and cannot travel over surfaces and
through spaces, as if it were a living, if elusive, entity, thereby situating drawing and per-
ception itself in quite photographic terms. One paradigmatic example that I have already
discussed is Seurat’s View through a Balcony Railing (see fig. 99), in which we look from
inside a room at a partially curtained window and, beyond it, a balcony and the outside
world at nighttime. Here the window is completely aligned with the drawing paper; light
from both the interior and the exterior appears to shine through the glass, in contrast to
the opacity of the black curtains that frame it. Through the glass, we can see the windows
of other buildings, some illuminated from within and others just barely visible. Other
explorations of the movement and obstruction of light include two drawings by Seurat of
figures sitting directly next to windows, On the Balcony (see fig. 98) and Reading (Lecture)
(fig. 118), the latter exhibited in the 1888 Salon des Indépendants. Both sitters seem to be
engaged in activities that require their visual attention, thereby further underscoring the
sight and touch in black and white
 importance of the light that penetrates the windows next to which they are seated. And,
like View through a Balcony Railing, the drawing Reading also contrasts the transparency of
the window with the heavy curtain that frames it on the right.
Thus far, I have focused on what have been classified as Seurat’s independent draw-
ings, but I want to turn now to some of the drawings he produced in connection with his
early figural paintings. More specifically, I want to explore the way that these drawings
not only exceed their preparatory function, but represent their subjects in fundamentally
opposite ways to the final paintings.33 This is certainly true for a trio of drawings that
Seurat executed of the reclining figure in the foreground of A Bathing Place, Asnières (see
fig. 54). One of the three drawings depicts the figure much as we see him in the painting:
lying down and facing away from the viewer, his entire body except for his feet included
in the picture, with an emphasis on well-defined, simplified contours (fig. 119). In another
drawing, we see the same figure in what appears to be the identical pose, but as if per-
ceived from a much closer vantage point, such that just a portion of his body fills the
entire page (fig. 120). The totality of the body in the first drawing is here transformed
into a fragment, our proximity to the subject rendering our perception of his entire body
impossible. In this drawing, Seurat takes up an exploration of surfaces rather than edges
and does so, in part, by embellishing the manifestly material creases and folds of the
figure’s shirt. Here, as in Skirt, the surface of the drawing is transformed into the wrinkled
and rippled surface of cloth, the patches of space around the figure that represent aerial
depth and transparency contrasting with the opacity and materiality of the clothing. A
third drawing features this same figure in what again looks like the same pose, from an
even closer vantage point (fig. 121). Much of the drawing consists of unmarked, white
paper representing a very close-up view of part of the figure’s shirt, and nearly all sur-
rounding space has been eliminated. Here proximity seems to limit the function of both
sight and touch, and all that we are able to make out of the figure himself is a portion of
the side of his head and face. The three drawings together thus illustrate the contingency
of sensory perception on nearness and distance as well as the dependence of sight on
legible contours and figure-ground distinctions, the absence of which have an almost
blinding effect. This trio of pictures also demonstrates how drawing can evoke transparent
atmosphere or opaque material, thereby alluding to the way that the paper itself is both a
fictionally transparent plane and a material surface.
Other groups of preparatory drawings for Bathing engage in a similar exploration of
the contingency of different forms of perception on physical proximity, of drawing as illu-
sionistic space versus material object, and of the evocation of the human figure through
contour or surface. Two drawings that Seurat produced of the figure in the middle ground
on the left side of Bathing—seated with his elbows resting on his bended knees—draw
one’s attention (figs. 122, 123). In the first drawing, we see the entire figure much as he
is depicted in the final painting, with the contours of his body clearly delineated. In the

183 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 119
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon
on Michallet paper, 95/8 × 123/8 in.
(24.5 × 31.5 cm). Fondation
Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. Beyeler
Collection.

FIGURE 120
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon
on paper, 91/2 × 113/4 in. (24.1 × 29.8
cm). Private collection.
FIGURE 121
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon,
97/8 × 121/4 in. (24.7 × 31.2 cm). Musée
du Louvre, Paris (RF29539).
185
second drawing, the pose seems to have been the same, but Seurat takes up a much closer
vantage point, such that the figure’s lower leg and a bit of thigh take up the entire space of
the drawing. Again, a fragment replaces the totality of the body, which is defined as much
by the way that light falls across its surface as by its contours, eliciting something akin to a
visual caress from the viewer. The drawing of the boy’s lower leg also constitutes an inter-
esting deviation from the Academic practice of drawing after plaster casts of sculptural
fragments, as Seurat himself did when he was an art student. This practice was intended to
develop the students’ understanding of the idealized human body of antique sculpture and,
more generally, to help students gain proficiency in rendering contour and volume. But,
in his focus on skin and surface rather than on volume and edge, Seurat takes his distance
here from the concept of drawing and of the body at work in Academic practice. These
same themes play out in other preparatory drawings for Bathing, including one depicting
the figure in the water with his back to us and another of the figure with his legs dangling
over the edge of the riverbank (figs. 124 and 125). The different points of view presented
in the two drawings seem to be the result of Seurat himself moving around the figure in
his studio, taking up multiple, successive vantage points at different distances from the
subject. Again, the clearly articulated contours of the whole figure seen in the first drawing
are largely supplanted in the second drawing by a focus on the surface of the skin on his
back, the artist positioned much closer to the sitter and thus representing only a section
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 122
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon,
91/2 × 123/8 in. (24.2 × 31.5 cm). Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven.
Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund
(1960.9.1).

FIGURE 123
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon,
91/8 × 113/4 in. (23 × 30 cm). National-
museum, Stockholm.
FIGURE 124
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon
on cream paper, 121/2 × 97/8 in. (31.7
× 24.7 cm). National Galleries of
Scotland, Edinburgh (D 5110;
19740).
FIGURE 125
Georges Seurat, Study for A Bathing
Place, Asnières, 1883. Conté crayon
on paper, 125/8 × 95/8 (32 × 24.5 cm).
Private collection.
187
of the larger whole. And here, too, as the hand of the artist both works the surface of the
paper and seems to run over the back of the model, touch is rendered as a supplement to
and an interruption of a purely visual comprehension of the figure’s form.
Having thus far analyzed the drawings from the perspective of their shared formal
and thematic features, I want to turn now to Seurat’s exhibition practices and strate-
gies as they pertain to this part of his œuvre. As I argued in relation to Seurat’s figural
paintings, so too does the significance of some of his drawings only fully emerge when
they are considered in the context of their exhibition counterparts. For example, the
three drawings that Seurat chose to show in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, The Fair
Performer (La banquiste) (fig. 126), Parade, and Condolences (see figs. 82 and 111), manifest the
same juxtaposition of private, intimate realms with public anonymity that we saw in the
pairing of Poseuses and Parade, and of Young Woman Powdering Herself and Chahut. In Fair
Performer, we see a lone female performer at an itinerant fair, leaning against a wall next
to a seated ticket seller. Seurat depicts her either before or in between performances, with
her head bent down, her arms folded close to the body, her costume partially covered by
a black robe, and no audience members or ticket buyers in sight. In short, she is shown
withdrawn into herself rather than entertaining an audience through her gestures and
movements. Seurat’s drawing reminds one of Degas’s similar practice of representing
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 126
Georges Seurat, The Fair Performer,
1883–84. Conté crayon, 123/8 × 91/2
in. (31.5 × 24 cm). Private
collection.
OPPOSITE FIGURE 127
Edgar Degas, Dance Rehearsal
on the Stage, 1874. Oil on canvas,
255/8 × 321/8 in. (65 × 81.5 cm).
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
188
some of his dancers in the moments before, after, or in between rehearsals and stage per-
formances. Indeed, many of Degas’s ballerina images highlight the distinctions in gesture
and attitude between those ballerinas who are rehearsing or performing onstage, when
their gestures are directed outward toward the audience, and those who are in between
performances, their movements turned in on themselves, as they scratch, stretch, fidget,
and so on, seen, for example, in the juxtaposition between the dancers in the middle
ground and those in the foreground of Dance Rehearsal on the Stage (fig. 127). But, unlike
Degas’s work, Seurat’s Fair Performer renders the time in between performances by means
of the absence of any communicating gestures. Seurat’s drawing Parade (see fig. 82) con-
tains many of the elements that signify public performance: the costumed figures on stage,
the open mouth of the male figure on the right as he calls out to the spectators, and the
circus animal in between them. But the audience for whom they perform is just barely
hinted at in the darkened lower half of the drawing. It is, ironically, in the third drawing
of the 1886 grouping, the private scene of figures gathered in Condolences, that Seurat ren-
ders social interaction and communication, rather than in the two public performance
scenes. Sociability is thus associated by Seurat not with the world of public amusements,
as was often the case in the work of the Impressionists, but rather with the private sphere,
something that occurs during a small gathering of family and friends. The subtle bodily
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 128
Georges Seurat, At the Concert
Européen, 1887–88. Conté crayon
and white gouache on paper,
121/4 × 93/8 in. (31.1 × 23.8 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Lillie P. Bliss Collection (121.1934).
FIGURE 129
Georges Seurat, At the Gaîté
Rochechouart, 1887–88. Conté
crayon with gouache on laid paper,
12 × 95/16 in. (30.5 × 23.5 cm).
Museum of Art, Rhode Island
School of Design, Providence. Gift
of Mrs. Murray S. Danforth (42.210).
190
gestures and movements seen in Condolences—the opposing turn of the heads of the
two figures on the right as they face one another, the head of the tall male figure slightly
cocked to one side—quietly but clearly convey a sense of interaction with and attentive-
ness to others.
Seurat showed eight drawings in the 1888 Salon des Indépendants, where they were
exhibited next to Poseuses and Parade, the largest group of drawings that he ever put on
view at one time. Four of the drawings—Man Dining, Reading, Young Woman (see figs. 113,
118, and 110), and one of a solitary street sweeper—represent single figures, all but one in
interiors, while the other four—At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), At the Gaîté
Rochechouart (À la Gaîté Rochechouart), At the Divan Japonais (Au Divan Japonais), and High
C (Forte chanteuse) (figs. 128–131)—depict the world of the café-concert. Thus, Seurat’s 1888
grouping enacts the juxtaposition of public spaces and Seurat’s private world: his father,
mother, and a model or visitor in his studio. Even more importantly, Seurat contrasts
solitary figures absorbed in quotidian activities with the world of performance and pub-
lic spectacles, akin to the contrast in the two paintings next to which the drawings were
shown. While the titles of three of the café-concert drawings identify the establishments
that they depict, Seurat otherwise elides the particularities of each locale and instead
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 130
Georges Seurat, At the Divan
Japonais, 1887–88. Conté crayon
on paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 23 cm).
Private collection.
FIGURE 131
Georges Seurat, High C, 1887–88.
Conté crayon and white gouache
on paper, 115/8 × 91/8 in. (29.5 × 23
cm). Private collection.
191
focuses on the essential components of these spaces: the female performer, her elaborate
gestures, her costume, the stage, the lighting, the music, and the audience. But one aspect
of the café-concert has been conspicuously excluded from Seurat’s renderings, namely,
the sense of sociability and gaiety that was the raison d’être of such establishments. It is
instructive to compare Seurat’s renderings of this world to two works by Degas, Café-
Concert at the Ambassadeurs and another called Café-Concert (figs. 132, 133). Images such as
Café-Concert at the Ambassadeurs clearly served as a model for Seurat’s own café-concert
drawings, and both artists depict the performance onstage from the vantage point of the
audience or the musicians’ area in front of the stage. Like Degas, Seurat underscores the
brilliant gas lighting and the exaggerated gestures of the female performers. But Degas’s
image also emphasizes the social nature of the space, with the main performer reaching
out, literally and figuratively, to her audience, and the heads of the spectators in the fore-
ground turned every which way to avail themselves of the enticements on offer. Unlike his
painted representations of popular entertainments, Seurat’s drawings of the café-concerts
are devoid of any sense of pleasure or sociability. These are, instead, remarkably silent and
still images. Seurat’s female protagonists are neither commanding nor seductive, and his
audience members appear immobilized and utterly unanimated.
sight and touch in black and white
FIGURE 132
Edgar Degas, Café-Concert at the
Ambassadeurs, 1876–77. Pastel on
monotype, 141/4 × 11 in. (36 × 28
cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.

Looking at the row of nearly identical spectators in the foregrounds of High C, At

the Concert Européen, and a similar drawing titled At the Concert Parisien (fig. 134), one can’t
help but be struck by the rigidity of their postures and the elision of their faces, both of
which convey a chilling sense of impassivity. They are, in a sense, visual counterparts to
Kahn’s verbal condemnation of the numbness induced in the audiences of public perfor-
mances that I discussed in the previous chapter. These spaces of leisure and entertainment,
Kahn wrote, “automatize” their audiences and bring about” the partial hypnotization of
the individual, relentlessly seated and a voluntary prisoner.” Seurat’s rendering of the

192 sight and touch in black and white

FIGURE 133
Edgar Degas, Café-Concert, 1876–
77. Pastel over monotype on paper
and board, 91/4 × 17 in. (23.5 × 43.2
cm). Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., William A. Clark
Collection.

FIGURE 134
Georges Seurat, At the Concert
Parisien, 1887–88. Conté crayon
heightened with white chalk,
123/8 × 91/4 in. (31.4 × 23.6 cm). The
Cleveland Museum of Art. Leonard
C. Hanna, Jr. Fund (1958.344).
FIGURE 135
Georges Seurat, Eden Concert,
1887. Black and blue chalk, white
and pink gouache, pencil and
brown ink on paper, 121/4 × 91/2 in.
(31.3 × 24 cm). Van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam. Vincent van Gogh
Foundation (d692V/1962).
194
spectators in his café-concert drawings illustrates precisely the kind of deadening passiv-
ity that Kahn decried in his essay. And, to make the point even more clearly, Seurat exhib-
ited these drawings with images of solitary figures sensorily and cognitively engaged in
small, specific activities and experiences.
The three drawings that Seurat exhibited in the 1889 exhibition of Les XX in
Brussels, At the Concert Européen, At the Gaîté Rochechouart (both exhibited the previous
year), and Paul Alexis (see fig. 108), reenact the contrast not only between Seurat’s private
world of friends and family and the public, anonymous space of the café-concert, but
also between figures defined by mental and physical engagement and ones who assume a
passive, spectatorial relationship to their surroundings. Another, complementary inter-
pretation begins to emerge when this 1889 trio of drawings is considered relationally: one
sees a juxtaposition between the solitary nature and space of artistic production, demon-
strated in the portrait of Alexis engrossed in the act of writing, and the public nature and
spaces of reception and exhibition, when one stands before an audience and, so to speak,
performs for the public. Indeed, Seurat’s painted sketches of his friend Aman-Jean as
Pierrot (see fig. 94) are evidence of his meditation on the notion of the artist as a public
entertainer. The 1889 trio, then, might productively be understood not only as images of
sight and touch in black and white
 the spaces of production and reception, but also as renderings of the relationship between
the artist-performer and his or her audience, thereby situating the seeming alienation
between performer and audience in Seurat’s drawings in a more self-reflexive light.
I want to conclude my discussion of Seurat’s café-concert drawings by addressing
the artist’s very selective introduction of white gouache and colored chalk into certain
parts of the images. In At the Gaîté Rochechouart, for example, gouache is used to delineate
the edge of the stage as well as the different sources of gaslight that illuminated the per-
formance. As such, Seurat emphasizes both the boundary between the stage and the rest
of the auditorium and the contrast between the brightly lit performance space and the
darkness in which the audience is submerged, both of which remind one of some of the
key characteristics of Wagner’s Bayreuth theater, as does the floating, otherworldly quality
of the performance. The dabs of gouache that represent light in the top right corner and at
the left edge of the picture also make clear Seurat’s interest in artificial light and its effects.
In fact, the thick line of gouache along the stage’s edge might also be meant to evoke the
lighting that would have been placed there to illuminate the figures from below. Looking
across Seurat’s body of café-concert drawings, one sees the artist consistently using
other media in the parts of the scene relating to illumination and costume. The contrast
between gouache or chalk and conté crayon is meant, I would propose, to underscore the
seductions and artifices of the performances, that is, to make clear that they are alluring
artifices that aim to solicit and hold our attention. At the Concert Européen is an especially
clear illustration of this, with the white gouache strategically placed along the edge of the
stage and on the skirt of the performer, as well as another two dabs added to the middle
of her torso, as if to highlight these parts of the scene as the focus of our interest. Likewise,
in Eden Concert, we see numerous dabs of gouache representing the globes of gaslight
around the stage, as well as near its bottom edge (fig. 135). Seurat’s subtle deployment of
pink to delineate the large bow on the performer’s dress has the same effect of not only
foregrounding the important role of light and costume in the appeal of the performance
to the audience, but also of making the viewers of Seurat’s drawings conscious of the main
components of the depicted artifices.34
Seurat’s attention to the illumination of these spaces of entertainment should be
seen as part of the broader, sustained interest expressed throughout his body of work and
even in his writing in different forms of artificial light and their diverse uses and effects.
Although his drawings and paintings of popular Parisian nighttime entertainments might
seem worlds away from the coastline of northern France that he represented summer after
summer in his seascapes, both kinds of images manifest a clear interest in artificial light
and lighting devices. In the case of his seascapes, it was not natural light and atmospheric
effects that seemed to most engage Seurat, but rather illuminating structures such as light-
houses, harbor signals, and so on. In his café-concert drawings, Seurat repeatedly evoked
through dabs, streaks, and splotches of bright white gouache the gas lighting placed along
the bottom of the stage, on the side walls, or shining from above. Distant as the realm of

195 sight and touch in black and white


FIGURE 136
Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, 1890.
Conté crayon, 143/8 × 121/2 in. (36.5 ×
31.6 cm). Private collection.
196
café-concerts might seem from that of lighthouses, there is actually a historical connection
between the types of lighting used by each. The intense illumination produced by heated
quicklime, or calcium oxide, was first used for lighthouse illumination in the early 1830s
before being adapted for use in the theater about a decade later. It continued to be used
for theater lighting well into the twentieth century, and it is from this context that the
expression “being in the limelight” originated.35 Seurat himself might even
be alluding to this connection in his use of white gouache to demarcate
the lighting in his café-concert drawings and the lantern atop the Honfleur
lighthouse in one of his seascape drawings, Harbor Light at Honeur (see fig.
10). Seurat’s letter to Beaubourg, in which he discusses his exploration of the
interactions between “local color and the illuminating color: sun, oil lamp,
gas, etc.,” serves as written confirmation of his interest in different forms of
light and their effects. Seurat’s wide-ranging analysis of light was an import-
ant part of his investigation of visual experience in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, with the diverse kinds of lights in his images serving as instruments
of orientation or disorientation, conveying information or, conversely, pro-
ducing a dazzling effect.36
The last drawings Seurat exhibited in his lifetime were portraits
of fellow artists and friends Paul Signac (fig. 136) and Paul Alexis (see fig.
108), shown together in the 1890 Salon des Indépendants. Seurat produced the portrait
of Signac to accompany an 1890 article written about him by Fénéon for the series Les
hommes d’aujourd’hui.37 It is the most formal and conventional portrait that Seurat ever
produced; unlike the portrait of Alexis, in which the writer is shown privately absorbed
in the act of writing, Signac is portrayed with a top hat, walking stick, and overcoat, fixed
in profile against a vaguely curtained background. It is a rather elegant but somewhat stiff
portrait of the artist in a more public persona, perhaps because the drawing was intended
to illustrate a critical essay about the sitter. And so the pairing of the Alexis and Signac
portraits might be understood to represent the private and public selves of the artist and,
relatedly, the experience of artistic production versus that of critical reception. Looking
at the Signac and Alexis portraits side by side, there can be little ambiguity about which
space is the more compelling and engaging, nor about which realm Seurat most identified
with. For an artist who wrote so little, and who was so frequently described by friends and
colleagues as laconic, there was perhaps more meaning in making and looking at art than
in writing and speaking about it, a fitting attitude for an artist whose body of work was
devoted to the pleasures and perils of our visual engagement with the world around us.
sight and touch in black and white
 Postscript
The Eiffel Tower as Urban Lighthouse

Gripping the rail in my hand, / stunned, drunk with fresh air, / I climbed, like a
spider, / in the immense iron web / . . . Here I was able to see, covering leagues, /
Paris, its towers, its dome of gold, / the circle of blue hills, / and in the distance . . .
more, more!
—François Coppée, “Sur la Tour Eiffel (Deuxième Plateau)”

An object when we look at it, it becomes a lookout in its turn when we visit it. . . .
The Tower is an object which sees, a glance which is seen. . . . It is a complete object
which has, if one may say so, both sexes of sight.
—Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower”

It is the experience of climbing up the Eiffel Tower and viewing the expansive vista
around him that the writer François Coppée described with such seeming enthusiasm in
the excerpt of the poem quoted above. And it is with a discussion of Seurat’s 1889 painted
panel of the Eiffel Tower, the ways that it constitutes an exception within his œuvre but
also manifests the same interests as many of his other pictures, that I want to conclude
my study of Seurat (fig. 137). Measuring only about nine by six inches, the painting is nev-
ertheless one of Seurat’s most widely known images, most likely due to the iconic status
of the tower and to the fact that Seurat was one of the first well-known artists to depict
this quintessential symbol of modern Paris. Its exceptional status within his body of work
lies, in part, in the fact that it falls outside the genre categories of landscape and figure that
structured almost all of Seurat’s work in painting, being neither a toile de lutte nor an étude
de paysage, as Seurat put it in his letter to Beaubourg. As such, the picture is a fitting sub-
ject for a postscript to a series of chapters structured around the basic categories of genre
and medium that defined almost all of Seurat’s artistic output. The Eiffel Tower picture
also stands as an exception to Seurat’s other painted works insofar as it was neither (as far
as we know) a preparatory work for a finished painting, unlike his croquetons for Bathing
and the Grande Jatte, nor ever publicly exhibited as a finished painting. It thus maintains a
rather ambiguous state between sketch and finished picture, a distinction that Seurat quite
FIGURE 137
Georges Seurat, Eiffel Tower,
1889. Oil on wood panel, 91/2 ×
6 in. (24.1 × 15.2 cm). The Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Museum purchase, William H.
Noble Bequest Fund (1979.48).
 firmly adhered to in the rest of his body of work. In these various ways, the painting of the
Eiffel Tower helps us to see Seurat’s œuvre and his ways of working more clearly, since the
picture is something of the exception that proves the rule.
In other crucial respects, however, this image is closely connected to many of the
key issues that I have argued were central to Seurat’s body of work, namely, his investiga-
tion of different forms of visual experience in the late nineteenth century and the distinct
modes of being that they can elicit. As the excerpt from Coppée’s poem makes clear, the
Eiffel Tower was not just a feat of modern engineering, but was a response to an intense
desire for different ways of visually taking in one’s environment. If the popularity of pan-
orama paintings peaked in Paris in the 1880s, then it is only fitting that that decade was
capped by the construction of the Eiffel Tower, which offered panorama-like vistas from
its multiple viewing platforms. Just as the very first panorama exhibited in Paris at the
beginning of the century depicted the city of Paris itself, by the end of the same century,
people were able to truly experience the city as a panorama, not by means of a painting
on canvas but by ascending the tower and enjoying a seemingly unencumbered bird’s-eye
view of the city. And indeed, the views from the tower’s platforms were frequently anal-
ogized to panorama paintings, not only by Coppée, but also by other contemporary writ-
ers, as well as by Roland Barthes in his remarkable essay on the tower, also quoted at the
beginning of this postscript.1
In his text, Barthes describes the ways in which the Eiffel Tower exceeded panora-
mas insofar as the tower is both the subject and the object of sight, that which sees and
that which is seen, “a complete object which has . . . both sexes of sight,” as he put it. One
could say, then, that the Eiffel Tower made not only Paris but also vision itself perceptible
in new ways. And it is in this context that Seurat’s painted sketch of the tower is so in
keeping with the rest of his body of work, for the tower directly evokes the possibilities,
conditions, and limits of one’s visual experience of one’s surroundings. Furthermore, and
as Barthes elaborates, the particular kind of looking elicited by the tower is a deciphering
gaze, one that actively seeks to make sense of the spatial relationships between and among
the different parts of the city that one sees. For this reason too, Seurat’s interest in the
Eiffel Tower is not surprising, given how profoundly engaged he was with the cognitive
dimensions of perception in much of his work. According to Barthes, the tower not only
offers the pleasurable experience of the endless vista (“nothing happier than a lofty out-
look,” he writes parenthetically), but it also transforms Paris into “an intelligible object.”
That is, the views from the tower provoke visitors to search for, identify, recognize, group,
and so on, the various parts of Paris spread out before them, to engage in what Barthes
calls the activity of “decipherment.”2 Like in some of Seurat’s pictures, so too does the
kind of visual observation encouraged by the tower take place, according to Barthes, in
relation to temporal extension, leading one to imagine the city’s development and trans-
formation over the previous centuries. Understood in these ways, the model of vision

199 postscript

FIGURE 138
Jules Bourdais, Design for a
monumental lighthouse for Paris,
November 1881. Watercolor, pencil
on tracing paper, 233/4 × 83/4 in.
(60.2 × 22.3 cm). Musée d’Orsay,
Paris.
200
evoked by the Eiffel Tower closely recalls the one illustrated in and elicited by
Seurat’s seascape series and some of his other works, where sustained visual
and mental engagement is required to make sense of the scene and its picto-
rial representation.
Over the course of the book I have also argued, however, that Seurat’s
work consistently foregrounds the corporeality of the viewer, exploring the
ways in which vision is both activated by but also confined to the body and its
particular physical location in space. The Eiffel Tower, by contrast, suspends
visitors in the air and thus frees them from the same kind of confinement to
a specific point in space. Here, too, Coppée’s poem might have something to
tell us about Seurat’s Eiffel Tower picture, and about the limitations, paradox-
ically, of the tower’s detached, distant, all-encompassing view. Looking from
the tower to “the bottom of the chasm,” Coppée wrote, “the City neither moved
me nor charmed me. It is an immobile scale-model, it is a dreary panorama.”3
Perhaps so too for Seurat, as he depicted the tower from the bottom looking
up, his placement on the ground underscored by the thickness of marks that
constitute the lowest part of the tower in his picture, and by the gradual attenu-
ation of marks and the tower’s solidity as it rises higher and higher up. The very
top of Seurat’s tower evaporates into the sky, a reflection, no doubt, of the fact
that the tower was not yet completed when he produced this picture. But this
absence of a peak might also signify that the views from the top of the tower,
like the vast expanses of sky and sea in his seascapes, are beyond what the eye,
body, and mind can grasp, and beyond what any single picture can represent.
In this small picture, and in many of Seurat’s other images, Seurat situated
himself firmly on the ground, inserted within and among the objects and spaces
of perception.
As I discussed at the end of the previous chapter, Seurat’s œuvre man-
ifests a sustained interest in various instruments and devices of illumination and in the
kinds of visual experiences that these different forms of illumination can evoke. Seurat’s
painting of the Eiffel Tower can, I think, be understood as another expression of this inter-
est. Indeed, the tower was, among other things, a monument to the city’s fascination with
light and to advances in lighting technology that developed throughout the nineteenth
century. In addition to the powerful electric light placed atop the tower and the slowly
moving red, white, and blue lights that lit up its summit, two roving beams of electric light
were projected from its apex onto various monuments around the city. On the evening
of its inauguration, the tower was illuminated by no less than ten thousand gas lamps.
Another finalist in the competition that was ultimately won by Gustave Eiffel and his
tower was a project called the Sun Tower (fig. 138). Its design is a testament to the interest
in new lighting mechanisms and in the ways that light could reshape one’s experiences
of one’s surroundings—an interest that gripped Paris at the end of the century. The Sun
postscript
 Tower was designed to house a museum of electricity, as well as to carry out scientific
experiments and to have a viewing platform for visitors to take in the city. But one of the
main purposes of the 360-meter masonry tower was to illuminate the entire city through
a complex system of mirrors that would direct light down to the ground, enabling anyone
to read a newspaper outside at night anywhere in Paris. Ultimately, the Eiffel Tower was
chosen over the Sun Tower, in part because it was feared that the light of the latter would
have a blinding rather than illuminating effect, thereby succinctly exemplifying the distinct
kinds of experience that illumination at the end of the nineteenth century could offer: to
enhance perception or diminish it, to orient or dazzle.4
The Eiffel Tower shared several features with the Sun Tower, and both structures
had a good deal in common with lighthouses, upon which one might argue they were
modeled. In fact, similarities and comparisons between the Eiffel Tower and lighthouses
abound, which is less surprising than it might initially seem, given the many, relatively
overlooked connections between Eiffel or his engineering firm and lighthouse design. As
early as 1868, for example, Eiffel and a partner were granted a patent for improvements in
the design of metal lighthouse towers and lanterns that were meant to combat condensa-
tion, corrosion, and certain structural vulnerabilities.5 Furthermore, the 1884 patent given
to Eiffel and two others for a three-hundred-meter tower that would ultimately result in
the Eiffel Tower identified “optical signaling” as one of its potential uses, thereby explicitly
aligning it with lighthouses and other such visual signaling structures. Subsequent presen-
tations and writings by Eiffel and others promoting the tower repeatedly reiterated optical
signaling and optical telegraphy as two of its possible functions.6 Eiffel and his engineering
company had also long been involved in the design of iron lighthouses, all located abroad,
some of which bear a close resemblance to the tower, such as the one completed in 1886
in Valassaaret, Finland, and an undated design for another lighthouse (figs. 139, 140). And,
of course, the Statue of Liberty, designed in 1886 by Eiffel’s company, not only originated
in a design by his partner Auguste Bartholdi for a lighthouse (hence the torch that she
holds aloft), but also functioned as a lighthouse until the early twentieth century and was,
accordingly, under the control of the United States Lighthouse Board.
Furthermore, the Eiffel Tower itself was repeatedly compared to a lighthouse,
and the lantern at its summit was commonly referred to as a phare or lanterne du phare,
including by Eiffel himself. One issue of the weekly publication for the 1889 Universal
Exposition that featured the top of the Eiffel Tower on its cover identified it with a caption
that read: “The Electric Lighthouse of the Eiffel Tower” (fig. 141), and the accompanying
article reaffirmed the connection between the tower and lighthouses: “The electric light
installed in the rotunda located at the summit of the Eiffel Tower is the same as the most
powerful lighthouses that are placed on the coasts of France.”7 Edmond de Goncourt
wrote more than once in his journal about the tower in the last year of its construction,
commenting in one of these entries that “the Eiffel Tower has the effect of a lighthouse
that was left on the earth by a generation that has disappeared.” And, in Eiffel’s 1902

201 postscript
LEFT FIGURE 139
Lighthouse in Valassaaret, Finland
designed by Gustave Eiffel’s engi-
neering company in 1886.

RIGHT FIGURE 140

Iron lighthouse design by Eiffel
and Co., n.d. Bibliothèque de
l’École nationale des ponts et
chaussées.

FIGURE 141
Cover of L’Exposition de Paris de
1889, June 1, 1889.
 book on the tower, he quotes the following statement by a visitor to the 1900 Universal
Exposition: “Just as a seaman who is approaching land tries to discover a lighthouse, the
eyes of pilgrims look for the Eiffel Tower, the lighthouse of the civilization of Paris.”8
Interestingly, before the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Champs de Mars had been
the site of regular experiments that were conducted from the nearby Lighthouse Depot,
which housed the Commission on Lighthouses that oversaw France’s entire network of
maritime signaling. Numerous experiments concerning the visibility of various kinds
of lights and lenses under different atmospheric conditions were conducted using the
lighthouse lantern atop the Depot as seen from the Champs de Mars.9 Located on the
Trocadero hill, the site of the Depot was chosen precisely for its proximity to the Champs
de Mars, its darkness at night used as a stand-in for that of the French coast. And, once
built, the Eiffel Tower was used in experiments related to lighthouse illumination that
continued to be run by the Commission on Lighthouses.
The many connections between lighthouses and the Eiffel Tower are yet another
reason why a postscript on Seurat’s picture of the monument is a fitting conclusion to a
book that opens with his seascape paintings of lighthouses and other kinds of optical sig-
naling structures. Both the tower and lighthouses were feats of modern engineering, and
both embodied a notion of light and sight as serving to enhance one’s knowledge about
one’s environment, with Eiffel and other supporters of the project touting the many sci-
entific and technological uses for the tower.10 And yet the Eiffel Tower, and the Universal
Exposition of which it was a part, also served as sheer entertainment for the millions of
people that experienced them. Indeed, in the later nineteenth century, the rhetoric sur-
rounding the world’s fairs underwent a discernible change, from an emphasis on their
didactic purpose to one on their entertainment value, and the focus shifted from the dis-
play of useful tools and machines to objects of consumer culture. This larger change was
embodied in the Eiffel Tower itself; for all the elevated rhetoric about the various ways it
could advance scientific and technological knowledge, it was, above all, a monument that
dazzled and thrilled the crowd.11 The tower, then, elicited the two modes of being that
Seurat explored so devotedly throughout his body of work, two ways of looking at and
experiencing the world that were brought together in this single structure and in this sin-
gle painted panel.

203 postscript
This page intentionally left blank
 notes
1 Seeing in Series
Epigraph. Angrand’s letter is quoted in Robert
Rey, La peinture française à la n du XIXe siècle, la
renaissance du sentiment classique: Degas-Renoir-
Gauguin-Cézanne-Seurat (Paris: G. van Oest,
1931), 95. All translations from the French are my
own, unless quoted from an English source or
unless otherwise noted.
1. Émile Verhaeren, “Les XX,” La Société nouvelle,
February 28, 1891; Jules Antoine, “Georges
Seurat,” La Revue indépendante, April 1891. In
addition to his five series of seascapes that are
the focus of this chapter, Seurat also exhibited
a handful of landscapes and riverscapes of the
Paris suburbs over the course of his career.
2. Comments such as the following are quite typ-
ical of the criticism on Seurat: “Le Fort Samson
and Le Bec du Hoc [two of Seurat’s seascapes
from 1885] are among the good things that we
have seen. By contrast, we cannot appreciate his
Sunday on the Grande-Jatte, which is crude in tone
and where the figures are drawn in profile, like
poorly made mannequins.” Émile Hennequin,
“Notes d’art—les impressionnistes,” La Vie mod-
erne, June 19, 1886.
3. Ellen Wardwell Lee, Seurat at Gravelines: The
Last Landscapes (Indianapolis: Indianapolis
Museum of Art, 1990); Eric Darragon, “Seurat,
Honfleur, et ‘La Maria’ en 1886,” Bulletin de la
Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (1984); Eric
Darragon, “Lumière-Frontière: Remarques
sur la série Port-en-Bessin de Seurat,” in L’art,
effacement et surgissement des gures (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991); Paul Smith,
“Seurat and the Port of Honfleur,” Burlington
Magazine 126, no. 978 (1984); and Robert Parker,
“Seurat à Port-en-Bessin: Le réalisme du Néo-
Impressionisme” [sic], in L’Art en Normandie
(Caen: Archives départementales, 1992).
4. Aristide Matthieu Guilbert, Histoire des villes de
France, vol. 1 (Paris: Furne, 1848), 186. The history
of the Nineteenth Line Infantry Regiment is dis-
cussed at length in Pierre Massé, Le 19e Régiment
d’Infanterie à travers l’histoire (1597–1923) (Paris:
Les Étincelles, 1928) and in a series of newspaper
articles by Louis Yvert, “Le 19ème et son his-
toire,” published between January and March of
1896 in La Dépêche de Brest.
5. Gustave Coquiot, Seurat (Paris: Albin Michel,
1924), 32, 33. I thank Robert Herbert for sharing
his knowledge about the history and contents of
the Brest sketchbook with me.
6. Throughout the book, I refer to Seurat’s paint-
ings by the titles listed in the original exhibition
catalogues, in English translation (with changes
in punctuation in a few cases), followed by the
original French at first mention of the work.
The exceptions are Poseuses, Parade de cirque,
and Chahut, which I refer to in French for lack
of precise English equivalents. If French and
English titles are nearly identical, no French
title is given. If Seurat exhibited the same work
under slightly different titles, the earliest title
is used.
7. Eric Darragon also believes that this is the van-
tage point from which Seurat paints Tip of the
Jetty. “Seurat, Honfleur, et ‘La Maria’ en 1886,”
276.
8. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery
of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840,
trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
For more on the port of Honfleur, see Dominique
Fournier, Ville de Honeur (Cully: Orep, 2006);
Georges Lanquest, La Côte normande, de Honeur
à Ouistreham (Paris: Bureaux du journal “le
Home,” 1902–04); Amédée Burat, Voyages sur les
côtes de France (Paris and Liège: J. Baudry, 1880),
111–113; and Leveson Francis Vernon-Harcourt,
 Harbours and Docks: Their Physical Features,
History, Construction, Equipment, and Maintenance
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), 576–580.
9. Madame (Edouard) de Lalaing, Les Côtes de la
France: Du Havre à Cherbourg (Lille: J. Lefort,
1886–1890), 38, 51.
10. Robert Herbert, in the catalogue for the 1991
Seurat retrospective organized by the Musée
d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
also hypothesizes that Mouth of the Seine, Evening
and The Shore at Bas Butin depict the same site
from inverse perspectives. Robert Herbert
et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 247. Seurat’s
letter is published in Henri Dorra and John
Rewald, Seurat: L’œuvre peint, biographie et cata-
logue critique (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1959), LII.
11. Georges Roque and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn
are the only art historians who have analyzed
the relevance of Helmholtz to Seurat, but both
largely confine their analysis to the issue of
color perception. See Roque, “Chevreul and
Impressionism: A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin
78, no. 1 (March 1996) and “Seurat and Color
Theory,” in Paul Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2009); Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “L’opti-
que du peintre (Seurat avec Helmholtz),” Critique
48 (May 1992); Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au
néo-impressionnisme [1899] (Paris: Hermann, 1978).
Signac also cites the influence of Helmholtz on
Seurat in Jacques Guenne, “Entretiens avec Paul
Signac, président du Salon des indépendants,”
L’Art vivant, March 20, 1925, 1–4.
12. The French translation of Helmholtz’s Treatise
on Physiological Optics was published as Optique
physiologique, trans. Émile Javal and N. Th.
Klein (Paris: Victor Masson, 1867). The English
translation quoted in my text is Helmholtz’s
Treatise on Physiological Optics, translated from
the third German edition, ed. James P. C.
Southall, 3 vols. (Rochester, New York: Optical
Society of America, 1924–1925; reprinted Bristol:
Thoemmes, 2000). Hippolyte Taine, De l’In-
telligence, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1870), trans.
T. D. Haye, On Intelligence (New York: Henry
Holt, 1875) reprint, ed. Daniel N. Robinson
(Washington, D.C.: University Publications of
America, 1977). The section of Taine’s text that
addresses spatial perception most extensively is
vol. 2, book 2 (The Knowledge of Bodies), chap-
ter 2 (“External Perception and the Education
206 notes to pages 17–25
of the Senses”), 40–96. To give another example,
Amédée Guillemin’s book La Lumière et la cou-
leur (Paris: Hachette, 1874) also devotes consider-
able attention to Helmholtz’s work in the section
on depth perception.
13. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress
of the Theory of Vision,” in Helmholtz on
Perception: Its Physiology and Development, ed.
Richard M. Warren and Roslyn P. Warren (New
York: Wiley, 1968), 114. As Helmholtz wrote in
the same essay, “seeing with two eyes, and the
difference of the pictures presented by each,
constitute the most important cause of our
perception of a third dimension in the field of
vision.” Ibid., 115.
14. Ibid., 114.
15. Treatise, III, 31. See also Helmholtz’s essay enti-
tled “The Origin of the Correct Interpretation
of our Sensory Impressions,” in which he wrote:
“Just how such cognizance of the significance of
visual images is first assembled by young chil-
dren becomes readily apparent when we watch
them while they are busy with objects offered
to them as toys, how they handle them, look
at them from all sides by the hour, turn them
around, put them in their mouths, etc., finally
throw them down or try to break them, and
repeat this each day. One cannot doubt that this
is the school where they learn the natural con-
dition of objects around them, while also under-
standing the perspective images and the use of
their hands.” Helmholtz on Perception, 252–253.
16. Helmholtz, “Recent Progress,” 112; ibid., 135 (ital-
ics in original).
17. Taine, On Intelligence, vol. 2, book 2, 73 (my
italics).
18. Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of
Optics to Painting,” first published in French
as “L’Optique et la peinture” in Ernst Brucke,
Principes scientiques des beaux-arts (Paris: G.
Baillière, 1878). Published in David Cahan, ed.,
Hermann von Helmholtz: Science and Culture,
Popular and Philosophical Essays (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
19. Helmholtz, Treatise, vol. 3, 295–296. Indeed, it
was the experience of looking through stereo-
scopes that helped scientists realize the import-
ant role played by binocular disparity in our
perception of depth.
20. “L’art de creuser une surface.” Seurat’s statement
was recounted by Kahn in his lengthy obituary
for the artist. See “Seurat,” L’Art moderne, April
 5, 1891. Seurat’s definition of painting closely
resembles a passage in Charles Blanc’s renowned
Grammaire des arts du dessin that reads: “La
peinture devant creuser des profondeurs fictives
sur une surface.” This section of Blanc’s text is
largely about linear perspective, and thus Blanc’s
use of “creuser” seems to refer to the creation of
a fictional sense of depth in a painting. Charles
Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin [1867] (Paris:
Henri Laurens, 1908), 503.
21. Christopher Drew Armstrong and Olivier
Liardet, “Des phares au concours: de l’Académie
royale d’architecture à l’École des Beaux-arts,
1745–1966,” Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture
(LHA) 24 (2ème semester 2012). Key sources on
France’s nineteenth-century maritime signal-
ing system are E. Allard, Les Phares: Histoire,
construction, éclairage (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1889)
and Léonce Reynaud, Mémoire sur l’éclairage et
le balisage des côtes de France (Paris: Imprimerie
impériale, 1864). Allard and Reynaud were two
of the most important figures in the develop-
ment and implementation of this system. See
also George H. Elliot, European Light-House
Systems: Being a Report of a Tour of Inspection
Made in 1873 (New York: D. Van Nostrand,
1875); entry for “phare” in Eugène Oscar Lami,
Dictionnaire encyclopédique et biographique de
l’industrie et des arts industriels (Paris: Librairie
des dictionnaires, 1887), VII: 225–239; and
Vincent Guigueno, Au service des phares: La
signalisation maritime en France XIXe–XXe siècle
(Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001).
An interesting discussion of the relationship
between lighthouses and discourses on vision
is offered by Edward Eigen in “Subject to
Circumstance: The Landscape of the French
Lighthouse System,” in Jan Birksted, ed.,
Landscapes of Memory and Experience (London:
Spon, 2000).
22. See, for example, Charles-Athanase Thomassin,
Petit almanach nautique et tables de marée des côtes
de France, Îles-Britanniques (Paris: 1882), and
Ferdinand Labrosse, Guide pratique du capitaine,
traité de navigation, d’astronomie et de météorologie
(Paris: A. Bertrand, 1867).
23. Helmholtz cited the impression of solidity
obtained through binocular vision as a paradig-
matic illustration of the central role of cognition
in our apprehension of the external world: “The
proof that visual perception is not produced
directly in each retina, but only in the brain
207 notes to pages 26–30
itself by means of the impressions transmitted to
it from both eyes, lies in the fact that the visual
impression of any solid object of three dimen-
sions is only produced by the combination of the
impressions derived from both eyes.” Helmholtz,
“Recent Progress,” 82.
24. The model of vision that I argue is at work in
Seurat’s seascapes partially accords with but
also differs in a number of ways from Jonathan
Crary’s account of visuality in the nineteenth
century in Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). There, Crary lays out
a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigm
of vision that took place in the first part of the
nineteenth century, from geometrical optics to
physiological optics, or what Crary calls “sub-
jective vision.” One of the key consequences of
the primarily physiological conception of vision
was, Crary insists, the separation of the senses
and the eventual “autonomization” of sight,
particularly from touch but from the body of
the observer more generally. In one sense, the
notion of vision evident in Seurat’s seascapes is
very much in keeping with Crary’s arguments
regarding the nineteenth-century conception
of vision as grounded in the corporeality and
physiology of the perceiver. But there are several
ways in which Crary’s conception of the nine-
teenth-century observer does not accommodate
Seurat’s seascapes. Among them are the “autono-
mization” of sight, where vision is separated
from the viewer’s spatial relationship to the
object(s) of perception and from the corporeality
of the body more generally, and the severing of
perception from the cognitive dimensions of
experience.
25. Quoted in Steven Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and
Self-Reection: The Modernist Myth of the Self
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
112; 99; Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme,”
L’Émancipation sociale, April 3, 1887. In another
essay the following year, Fénéon wrote that
“Claude Monet is a spontaneous painter; the
word ‘impressionist’ was created for him and
it fits him better than anybody. He impulsively
gets excited in front of a spectacle, but there is
nothing of the contemplator or analyst in him.”
“Calendrier de juin,” La Revue indépendante,
August 1888. Reprinted in Oeuvres plus que com-
plètes, vol. 1, ed. Joan U. Halperin (Geneva: Dros,
1970), 113.
26. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reection,
 127. In a letter to Alice Hoschedé written on
January 26, 1884, Monet makes a similar dis-
tinction between the wonder of looking at the
constantly changing landscape and the difficulty
of representing it in his work: “The motifs are
terribly hard to get hold of and put down on
canvas; everywhere is so luxuriant; it is gorgeous
to behold.” In Richard Kendall, ed., Monet by
Himself, trans. Bridget Strevens Romer (London:
Macdonald Orbis, 1989), 79. In another letter
from the following year, Monet writes that
“Étretat is becoming more and more amazing,
now is the real moment, the beach with all its
fine boats, it is superb and I am enraged not to
be more skillful in rendering all this. I would
need two hands and hundreds of canvases.”
Quoted in Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-
Reection, 48.
27. Perry’s recollection is published in Linda
Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-
Impressionism, 1874–1904, Sources and Documents
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 35.
One is reminded of Paul Cézanne’s famous
characterization of Monet as “nothing but an
eye—but what an eye!” Quoted in Ambrose
Vollard, Paul Cézanne (Paris: Galerie Vollard,
1914). Indeed, this is precisely the way that the
Symbolist novelist and critic Paul Adam char-
acterized the Impressionists in an 1886 review
of their last exhibition: “To render the prime
aspect of visual sensation, without letting the
understanding lead it astray. . . . To learn to see,
but to see exclusively the initial appearance
of things; to retain this vision and to fix it;
this is the aim of these . . . painters.” “Peintres
impressionnistes,” Revue contemporaine litteraire,
politique, et philosophique, April 1886. Several
years later, Adolf von Hildebrand described the
Impressionists in identical terms as Adam, writ-
ing that “the Impressionists racked their brains
to see nature in such a way as if they had no
brains.” Quoted in John Alsberg, Modern Art and
Its Enigma (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1983), 118.
28. Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-
Impressionism, 35. Charles Stuckey, in his
essay “Monet’s Art and the Act of Vision,”
makes a similar point that Monet’s notion
of vision deliberately excluded the cognitive
components of perception. John Rewald and
Frances Weitzenhoffer, eds., Aspects of Monet:
A Symposium on the Artist’s Life and Time (New
208 notes to pages 31–33
York: Abrams, 1984). Interestingly, Monet’s
description of the separation of visual sensation
from cognition seems to allude to the centu-
ries-old philosophical and scientific debate
known as “Molyneux’s problem” or “Molyneux’s
question.” William Molyneux was a seven-
teenth-century Irish philosopher who had writ-
ten to John Locke and asked him if a person who
had been born blind and then gained his sight
would be able to visually recognize and name
objects that he had up to that point known only
through touch. It was a question that continued
to be investigated throughout the nineteenth
century and beyond. For more on the subject,
see Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question:
Vision, Touch, and the Philosophy of Perception
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
and Marjolein Degenaar, Molyneux’s Problem:
Three Centuries of Discussion on the Perception
of Forms, trans. Michael J. Collins (Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1996).
29. Steven Z. Levine, Monet and His Critics, (New
York: Garland, 1976), 1. For more on the tableau
and morceau in nineteenth-century French
painting and criticism, see also Michael Fried,
Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in
the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996) and Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:
Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
30. The use of the term “series” in relation to
Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare paintings is dis-
cussed in Richard R. Brettell, “The ‘First’
Impressionist Exhibition,” in Charles F. Moffett,
ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886
(San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco, 1986), 197–198. Grace Seiberling
closely analyzes the use of the term in the con-
text of nineteenth-century painting in Monet’s
Series (New York: Garland Publications, 1981).
Monet’s decision to work in series as a solution
to the perceived insufficiency of individual
paintings is discussed in Levine, Monet and His
Critics and Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reection,
as well as chapter 4 of Kermit Swiler Champa’s
Masterpiece Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh, and
Monet (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994). Some scholars have also
hypothesized that Monet’s serial production
strategy was spurred in part by the emergence
of the Neo-Impressionists in 1885–1886, specifi-
cally, by the large scale of their paintings and the
 ostensibly methodical nature of their pointillist
style. Along these lines, Monet’s production in
1886 of one of only two self-portraits (that we
know of) during his entire career might confirm
that 1886 was a time of reevaluation for him.
Mirbeau is quoted in Levine, Monet and His
Critics, 141 (my translation).
31. Although the flâneur is often defined by a sense
of cool detachment from his surroundings,
Charles Baudelaire’s famous characterization
of the flâneur in “The Painter of Modern Life”
is actually more complex, even contradictory.
At certain points in the essay, Baudelaire does
indeed describe the flâneur as an impartial
observer of his environment, but at other points
he is described as seduced by the external world,
longing to be dissolved into it through a merg-
ing of the “I and the non-I.” But both aspects of
Baudelaire’s definition of flânerie stand in stark
contrast to the purposeful and epistemologi-
cally oriented model of perambulation that is
at work in Seurat’s seascape pictures. Charles
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans.
and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo,
1964). More recent treatments of the concept of
the flâneur can be found in Keith Tester, ed., The
Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994).
32. “L’Exposition des Artistes Indépendants,” Le
XIXe siècle, March 28, 1887; Pinxit, “La Vie
artistique—Exposition des Indépendants,” La
Vie moderne, April 22, 1888. Kermit Champa dis-
cusses the dependence of Monet’s serial practice
on private gallery exhibitions in “Masterpiece”
Studies, 123–133. In Seurat’s only substantive
written statement about his work, his famous
1890 letter to Maurice Beaubourg, the artist
listed every exhibition he participated in up to
that point and the works that were shown in
each. That Seurat organized his body of work in
this text according to exhibition can be seen as
indicative of the importance of these groupings
to him. The first page of Seurat’s letter is repro-
duced in fig. 43. The letter is published in full in
Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 372 and
381–382. For more on this letter, see footnote 35
below.
33. Art historians’ analysis of Seurat’s seascapes
has largely (though not exclusively) focused on
investigations into the original sites depicted in
Seurat’s works and on the mimetic relationship
between the images and the sites. Beginning with
209 notes to pages 33–34
two articles on the Honfleur series, Paul Smith’s
very short essay entitled “Seurat and the Port of
Honfleur” posits that “natural fidelity played a
considerable role in [the] conception” of Seurat’s
paintings, and tries to establish the time of day
that the paintings were most likely produced via
an analysis of the shadows in particular paint-
ings. Eric Darragon’s essay of the same year,
entitled “Seurat, Honfleur, et ‘La Maria’ en 1886,”
focuses primarily on Seurat’s The Maria. While
Darragon’s essay carefully notes the relationship
between the various sites depicted in the series,
his main objective is to situate the series within a
detailed investigation into the history, economy,
and everyday life of the port and city of Honfleur.
A rather brief essay written by Robert Parker
entitled “Seurat à Port-en-Bessin: Le réalisme du
Néo-Impressionisme” [sic], which he wrote when
carrying out research for the major 1991 Seurat
retrospective at the Metropolitan, focuses on
Seurat’s six Port-en-Bessin paintings. Although
Parker acknowledges the ways in which the
series portrays various parts of the port and
the surrounding area from different vantage
points, he, too, focuses on ascertaining the times
of day at which the different paintings were
produced and on establishing Seurat’s fidelity to
the appearance of the sites (hence the title of the
essay). The most conceptually provocative of the
writings on Seurat’s seascapes is Eric Darragon’s
essay, “Lumière-Frontière: Remarques sur la
série Port-en-Bessin de Seurat,” in L’art, efface-
ment et surgissement des gures (Paris: Publications
de la Sorbonne, 1991). Darragon, while devoting
some attention to deciphering the times of day
represented in each picture and other similar
questions about the actual appearance of the
site, goes well beyond the aligning of reality and
representation. His line of inquiry is the closest
to my own, proposing that the meaning of the
series lies in the operations of vision that Seurat’s
six paintings reconstitute via the representation
of the same or contiguous sites from different
points of view. But our understandings of the
notion of vision put forward by Seurat widely
differ, with Darragon arguing that the series is a
meditation on visual control and anarchy. Lastly,
Ellen Wardwell Lee’s exhibition catalogue on
Seurat’s last series at Gravelines also notes the
ways in which the individual paintings together
have a “quasi-panoramic” effect, but doesn’t fur-
ther develop this interesting characterization.
 34. Émile Verhaeren, “Georges Seurat,” La Société
nouvelle, April 30, 1891; Roger Marx, “Les
Impressionnistes,” Le Voltaire, May 17, 1886;
Jules Christophe, “Chronique: Rue Laffitte, No.
1,” Journal des artistes, June 13, 1886; anonymous,
“Types d’artistes,” L’Art moderne, March 2, 1890
(my italics). While Seurat’s vast multifigural
compositions such as Bathing and the Grande
Jatte combine figure and landscape, by 1886 he
would definitively separate out these two kinds
of painting from one another. And although
those two paintings do not fall into clear genre
categories, they were obviously meant to be seen
as studio rather than plein-air productions.
35. Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 372
and 381–382. Several drafts of this letter, dated
August 28, 1890, were found in Seurat’s studio
after his death, and the belief that he never
sent any of them to Beaubourg is undisputed
in the scholarly literature. But the month after
Seurat drafted his text, Beaubourg published
an article on the deaths of Dubois-Pillet and
Van Gogh that makes multiple references, both
direct and indirect, to Seurat’s text. For example,
Seurat describes Dubois-Pillet in his letter as
“loyal-hearted, un upright nature.” Beaubourg
quotes this phrase in his essay and states explic-
itly that it came from a text that Seurat wrote
to him. In addition, Beaubourg’s two-sentence
description of the first encounter between
Seurat and Van Gogh repeats, nearly word for
word, Seurat’s account of this meeting in his let-
ter. Maurice Beaubourg, “Les Indépendants: La
mort de Dubois-Pillet et de Vincent Van-Gogh,”
La Revue indépendante XVI, no. 47 (September
1890): 391–402.
36. The signage in the painting also reminds one
of the charts of letters used by optometrists to
test visual acuity, which were already in use in
the nineteenth century. Georges Roque briefly
addresses the subject of Seurat, Helmholtz, and
the relationship between visual sensations and
language in “Seurat and Color Theory,” in Paul
Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed, 58.
37. Meyer Schapiro understood Seurat’s pointillism
in somewhat related terms, remarking that the
individual “dot” of pigment was “both an ele-
ment of facture and an element of sensation.”
Ignace Meyerson, ed., Problèmes de la couleur;
exposés et discussions du Colloque du Centre de
recherches de psychologie comparative tenu à Paris
les 18, 19, 20 mai 1954 (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957), 251.
210 notes to pages 34–40
38. Quoted and translated in Jonathan Unglaub,
“Poussin’s Reflection,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 3
(September 2004): n. 7, 524. Carl Goldstein
also discusses Poussin’s text in “The Meaning
of Poussin’s Letter to De Noyers,” Burlington
Magazine 108, no. 758 (1966).
39. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Éléments de per-
spective pratique, à l’usage des artistes, suivis de
Réexions et conseils à un élève sur la peinture,
et particulièrement sur le genre du paysage [1799]
(Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973). For more
on Valenciennes’s treatise, see Kermit Swiler
Champa, The Rise of Landscape Painting in France:
Corot to Monet (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1991)
and Henri Dorra, “Valenciennes’s Theories:
From Newton, Buffon, and Diderot to Corot,
Chevreul, Delacroix, Monet, and Seurat,” Gazette
des Beaux-Arts 124 (1994).
40. Quoted in Germain Bapst, Essai sur l’histoire des
panoramas et des dioramas (Extrait des “Rapports
du jury international de l’Exposition universelle de
1889”) (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891), 14–15.
41. Entry for “Panorama,” Dictionnaire des termes
employés dans la Construction (Paris: Morel, 1881),
529. Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts forward a more
metaphorical definition of panoramic vision
in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of
Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 60–62, 189,
and 192–193. Stephan Oettermann discusses the
interest in the horizon in Europe in the late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries in The Panorama:
History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas
Schneider (New York: Zone, 1997).
42. Illustrated Guide to Paris (London: Cassell,
1884). Quoted in Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular
Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
149–150. Detailed information on the number of
visitors to panoramas in France in the second
half of the nineteenth century can be found in
François Robichon, “Le panorama, spectacle de
l’histoire,” Le Mouvement social 131 (1985). Seurat’s
painting of the Eiffel Tower is discussed in
greater depth in the postscript.
43. Delécluze is quoted in Bernard Comment, The
Painted Panorama, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen
(New York: H. N. Abrams, 2000), 112–113 (my
italics). My translation of the second passage
corrects what I imagine to be a mistake in
the original French text. The author seems
to be claiming that the experience of seeing a
 panorama of London, while not quite equivalent
to actually being in the city, would help orient
oneself there. Although the author actually
wrote that both propositions would be false, he
seems to have meant that “it would not be false
to say,” rather than “it would not be true to say.”
Ibid., 18.
44. One of Daguerre’s church dioramas is described
in detail in the entry for “diorama” in Pierre
Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe
siècle (Paris: Administration du grand dic-
tionnaire universel, 1870), VI: 143–144.
45. The description of the Swiss mountainscape
diorama is in L. J. M. Daguerre, The History of
the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, trans. Helmut
and Alison Gernsheim (New York: Dover, 1968),
26–27. The passage on the Holyrood diorama
was published in The Mirror of Literature,
Amusement, and Instruction, March 26, 1825,
quoted in Daguerre, ibid., 26–27.
46. Quoted in Comment, The Painted Panorama,
145. Monet’s Water Lilies installation is dis-
cussed in Robert Gordon and Charles Stuckey,
“Blossoms and Blunders: Monet and the State,”
Art in America 67 ( January–February 1979 and
September 1979): 102–117 and 109–125. In fact,
Félix Fénéon explicitly contrasted the paintings
of Monet and the sense of a cut that they convey
with the totality of panorama paintings, writing
that “a landscape of Monet never completely
develops a subject of nature, and it seems like
any one of twenty rectangles that one would cut
in a panoramic canvas of 100 square meters.”
“Certains,” Art et critique, December 14, 1889.
47. My juxtaposition of Seurat’s more cognitive
model of perception with Monet’s spectatorial,
pre- or anticognitive notion of vision could
productively be expanded to apply to the dif-
ferences between the experiences of looking
at a panorama and a diorama. The former is
designed for an ambulatory spectator and could
be said to elicit various acts of discernment and
identification; in the case of cityscape panora-
mas, for example, the visitor is encouraged to
try and identify different parts of the depicted
scenes and to decipher their relationship to each
other within the larger painting. The diorama,
by contrast, requires an immobile viewer and,
given that the picture is constantly changing
during the performance, doesn’t allow for the
kind of analysis and sustained visual study that
the panorama elicits. Roland Barthes, in his
211 notes to pages 41–49
essay on the Eiffel Tower, makes a similar claim
about panorama paintings: “This is why a pan-
orama can never be consumed as a work of art,
the aesthetic interest of a painting ceasing once
we try to recognize in it particular points derived
from our knowledge.” Writing on the experience
of looking out at a panoramic view of Paris from
the Eiffel Tower, Barthes contrasts a “euphoria
of aerial vision which recognizes nothing other
than a nicely connected space,” with “the intel-
lectual effort of the eye before an object which
requires to be divided up, identified, reattached
to memory,” what he ultimately describes as the
“generally intellectual character of panoramic
vision.” Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in
The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1979).
48. The title Les Grues and la Percée refers to specific
geographic locales close to Port-en-Bessin. Les
Grues was the name for a part of the shore to the
west of Port-en-Bessin, and Pointe de la Percée
was to the west of Les Grues. For more infor-
mation on Port-en-Bessin, see Annie Fettu, Ville
de Port en Bessin (Cully: OREP, 2003); Georges
Lanquest, La Côte normande, de Ouistreham à
Port-en-Bessin (Paris: Bureaux du journal “le
Home,” 1902–1904); Ardouin-Dumazet, Voyage en
France, 6ème série (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1896);
and E. F. A. Chigouesnel, Nouvelle histoire de
Bayeux (Bayeux: 1867).
49. Like the jetties of Honfleur, those of Port-en-
Bessin were praised for the compelling views
that they offered of their environs. See, for
example, Guide du touriste dans le Calvados
(Calvados: Syndicat d’initiative du Calvados,
1907), 99.
50. Gustave Kahn, “La Vie artistique,” La Vie mod-
erne, April 9, 1887; C. Delon, “Aux XX,” L’Art mod-
erne, February 3, 1889. Along these same lines,
Félix Fénéon wrote in 1887 that “the sight of the
sky, of the water, of the greenery varies from
instant to instant, according to the first impres-
sionists. . . . From this resulted the necessity to
capture a landscape in a sitting and a propensity
to make nature grimace in order to prove that
the minute was unique and that one would
never see it again. To synthesize the landscape
in a definitive appearance that prolongs the sen-
sation, it is this that the neo-impressionists are
attempting. Moreover, their work does not put
up with haste and entails work in the studio.”
 “Le Néo-impressionnisme,” L’Art moderne, May
1, 1887.
51. Octave Maus, “Le Salon des XX à Bruxelles,” La
Cravache, February 16, 1889 (my italics).
52. Helmholtz, Treatise, vol. 3, 154–155; ibid., 14; and
ibid., 29.
53. Louis Figuier, L’Année scientique et industrielle,
8ème année, 1863 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette,
1865), 225. For more on semaphores, see also
Alfred Plocque, De la mer et de la navigation mari-
time (Paris: Durand, 1870).
54. “Revue chronometrique,” June 1888, in L’Heure
nationale (méridien de Paris). Longitude en degrés
et en temps des départements et arrondissements de
la France et de diverses localités de l’Algérie et des
colonies françaises. Table pouvant servir à mettre
les horloges sur l’heure de Paris (Angoulême: au
siège du syndicat des bijoutiers de la Charente,
1888). Time measurement in Europe in the
nineteenth century is discussed in Derek Howse,
Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) and
Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps:
Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2004).
55. Albert Dubois-Pillet’s letter to Paul Signac
in which he discusses Seurat’s participation
on the committee is quoted in Herbert et al.,
Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 409. Seurat ended up
exhibiting one of his Port-en-Bessin paintings
alongside the two pictures from Le Crotoy, most
likely because of an increase in the number of
spaces allotted to each artist—from two to three
works—only after he had returned from Le
Crotoy to Paris.
56. Ernest Hoschedé, “Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” L’Événement, March 27, 1887;
Marcel Fouquier, “L’Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” Le XIXe siècle, March 28, 1887;
Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Les Indépendants,” La
Revue indépendante, April-June 1887; Thiebault
Sisson, “A propos d’une exposition—L’Évolution
de la peinture,” La Nouvelle revue, January-
February 1888. See also Alphonse Germain’s
comment that “We find again, as always, Seurat
and his finely viewed seascapes.” “L’Exposition
des Indépendants—Les Néo-impressionnistes et
leur théorie,” Art et critique, September 15, 1889.
57. Paul Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” Revue
contemporaine littéraire, politique, et philosophique,
April 1886, and “Les Artistes indépendants,” La
Vogue, September 6–13, 1886; Gustave Kahn, “La
Vie artistique,” La Vie moderne, April 9, 1887 and
212 notes to pages 49–63
Marcel Fouquier, “Les Impressionnistes,” Le XIXe
siècle, May 16, 1886; Émile Verhaeren, “Le Salon
des Vingt à Bruxelles,” La Vie moderne, February
26, 1887; and Jules Christophe, “Les évolution-
nistes du pavillon de la Ville de Paris,” Journal des
artistes, April 24, 1887.
58. See MM. Brunel, Géographie générale du dépar-
tement du Nord: physique—politique—economique
(Lille: L. Danel, 1885), 99–101 and Ardouin-
Dumazet, Voyage en France, 18ème série (Paris:
Berger-Levrault, 1899), 260–265.
59. On the lighthouse of Gravelines, see Eliot,
European Light House Systems, 186 and Allard,
Phares, 84. The most literal definition of phare
in Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe
siècle (1874), XII: 755, reads, in part: “A tower . . .
mounted by a light that is illuminated at night
to guide ships.” But the term is also defined as:
“That which sheds light on, that which serves to
find one’s way.”
60. André Lhote, Seurat (Rome: Valori Plastici, 1922),
11.
61. Joan U. Halperin briefly discusses the children in
these two paintings in “The Ironic Eye/I in Jules
Laforgue and Georges Seurat,” in Paul Smith,
ed., Seurat Re-Viewed, 140.
2 Figuring Out Vision
Epigraph. Félix Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,”
La Vogue, June 13–20, 1886 and Émile Verhaeren,
“Le Salon des Vingt à Bruxelles,” La Vie mod-
erne, February 26, 1887, 138. Fénéon’s essay
was reprinted, with minor modifications, as
part of a longer pamphlet by him entitled Les
Impressionnistes en 1886 (Paris: Publications de La
Vogue, 1886).
1. Indeed, almost as soon as it was exhibited, the
Grande Jatte was discussed by some as the “man-
ifesto painting” not only of Seurat but of the
Neo-Impressionist movement more broadly:
“The manifesto painting of M. Seurat, the sign of
a new school.” Maurice Hermel, “L’Exposition de
Peinture de la rue Laffitte,” La France libre, May
28, 1886.
2. Jean Ajalbert, “Le Salon des impressionnistes,”
La Revue moderne littéraire, politique et artistique,
June 20, 1886, 392 and Émile Verhaeren, “Le
Salon des Vingt à Bruxelles,” La Vie moderne,
February 26, 1887, 138.
3. Many of these preparatory works are repro-
duced in Robert Herbert et al., Seurat and
the Making of “La Grande Jatte” (Chicago: Art
 Institute of Chicago and Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004). Albert Boime elab-
orates on the terms used for different kinds of
preparatory works in The Academy and French
Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Phaidon, 1971). Boime characterizes the croquis
as the artist’s “rst, ‘first thought,’” that is, the
artist’s most immediate rendering of the motif,
81. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts
offers a similar definition, stating that the “cro-
quis should produce the lively impression made
by the thing itself, taken in with a quick glance”
(Paris: Firmin Didot, 1896), V: 41.
4. For a review of art historians’ various meth-
odological approaches to the Grande Jatte,
see John House, “Reading the Grande Jatte,”
The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 14,
no. 2 (1989): 115–131; Herbert’s essay in Robert
Herbert et al., Seurat and the Making of “La
Grande Jatte” (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
and Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004); and the introduction to Paul Smith, ed.,
Seurat Re-viewed (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2009). For interpreta-
tions that focus on the class and gender of the
figures in the painting, see the conclusion of T.
J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in
the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 259–267;
Linda Nochlin, “Seurat’s La Grande Jatte: An
Anti-Utopian Allegory,” in The Politics of Vision:
Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society
(New York: Harper and Row, 1989): 170–193; and
Hollis Clayson, “The Family and the Father: The
Grande Jatte and Its Absences,” The Art Institute of
Chicago Museum Studies 14, no. 2 (1989): 154–164
and reprinted in Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed.
For more political interpretations of the pic-
ture, see Stephen Eisenman, “Seeing Seurat
Politically,” The Art Institute of Chicago Museum
Studies 14, no. 2 (1989): 210–221, and Michael F.
Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of His
Time (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1991), 135–148.
5. Paul Adam seemed to see the spatial construc-
tion of the painting as significant, and he repeat-
edly addressed it in his reviews. For example,
he wrote of the painting’s “prodigious perspec-
tival recession” in “Les Artistes Indépendants,”
La Vogue, September 6–13, 1886, 262, and of “the
deep perspective of the leafy island” in “Les
Impressionnistes à l’Exposition des Indépen-
dants,” La Vie moderne, April 15, 1888, 229.
213 notes to pages 65–71
6. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin [1867]
(Paris: Henri Laurens, 1908); Charles Blanc,
The Grammar of Painting and Engraving, trans.
Kate Newell Doggett (New York: Hurd and
Houghton, 1875). Seurat’s close familiarity with
Blanc’s writings is discussed by Zimmermann
in Seurat and the Art Theory of His Time, 17–19
and in “Seurat, Charles Blanc, and Naturalist Art
Criticism,” The Art Institute of Chicago Museum
Studies 14, no. 2 (1989): 199–209. More broadly,
the regard that Blanc had for figure-based art
of the Italian Renaissance (especially quattro-
cento art) led him to spearhead the creation of
a Musée des copies in Paris in the early 1870s
in order to heighten public and artistic engage-
ment with this tradition. The founding of the
Musée des copies is one indication that the
relationship of the classical pictorial tradition
to contemporary artistic production was very
much a live issue in the late nineteenth century.
Albert Boime analyzes Blanc’s museum in “Le
Musée des copies,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 64
(October 1964): 237–247 and “Seurat and Piero
della Francesca,” Art Bulletin 47 ( June 1965):
265–271. As Boime explains, Blanc intended the
Musée des copies to be an antidote to the rise
of Impressionism. Given that the Grande Jatte
very directly, and equally, engages with both of
these paradigms, one might argue that Seurat
is exploring the conventions and assumptions
that underpin each, including their respective
definitions of vision. For more on the centrality
of linear perspective to the curriculum of the
École des Beaux-Arts, see Boime, The Academy
and French Painting.
7. Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, trans. Kate
Newell Doggett, The Grammar of Painting and
Engraving (New York: Hurd and Houghton,
1875), 55–56.
8. Quoted in Herbert et al., Seurat and the Making
of “La Grande Jatte,” 25, n. 3. Seurat’s reported
downplaying of the significance of the painting’s
subject matter in favor of its affinity with ambi-
tious French figural painting recalls David’s own
foregrounding of the relationship of the Oath
to that same tradition: “If it is to Corneille that
I owe my subject,” David writes, “it is to Poussin
that I owe my painting.” Alexandre Péron,
Examen du tableau des Horaces (Paris: 1839), 31,
quoted in F. Hamilton Hazlehurst, “The Artistic
Evolution of David’s Oath,” Art Bulletin 42, no.
1 (March 1960): 60. Seurat’s reported linking of
 the Grande Jatte to the Oath reminds one that
he was a pedagogical descendant of David, since
Seurat studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with
Lehmann, who was one of the most devoted
pupils of Ingres, who was a student of David’s.
Relatedly, Seurat’s œuvre contains several draw-
ings and sketches that demonstrate a careful
consideration of the grand French tradition of
painting and a querying of his own place within
it. A particularly salient example is Seurat’s
drawing of Poussin’s hand, based on a portrait
by Ingres of the latter, which itself was based on
a self-portrait by Poussin. Along the edge of the
paper Seurat wrote, “there is genius.”
9. This draft of the letter to Beaubourg is repro-
duced in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891,
381.
10. Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat and ‘La Grande Jatte,’”
Columbia Review 17, no. 1 (1935): 9–16.
11. The importance of the figure of the little girl for
the Grande Jatte seems to have been understood
by Maurice Denis, as seen in his rejoinder to
Seurat’s painting, Spots of Sunlight on the Terrace,
from 1890. Although the two pictures, as far as
I know, have not been linked to one another,
Denis’s painting seems to me to be a relatively
direct response to Seurat’s, just as Denis’s term
“Neo-Traditionism” was a counter to the term
“Neo-Impressionism.” Like Seurat’s painting,
Spots of Sunlight prominently features a little
girl in a dress facing the viewer, each of them
occupying very similar places in their respective
compositions.
12. Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of
Optics to Painting,” translated from German
to French as “L’Optique et la peinture” in Ernst
Brucke, Principes scientiques des beaux-arts
(Paris: G. Baillière, 1878). Published in David
Cahan, ed., Hermann von Helmholtz: Science
and Culture, Popular and Philosophical Essays
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 284.
13. Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries,”
L’Art moderne, September 19, 1886, 301.
14. Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Optics to
Painting,” 283; 284–285.
15. “Les Vingtistes Parisiens,” L’Art moderne, June 27,
1886, 204; Jean Ajalbert, “Le Salon des Impres-
sionnistes,” La Revue moderne litteraire, politique
et artistique, June 20, 1886, 392; Jules Christophe,
“Georges Seurat,” Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no.
8 (1890).
16. John Leighton, Seurat and “The Bathers” (London:
214 notes to pages 71–83
National Gallery Publications and New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997), 74–75. In his 1890
letter to Fénéon, Seurat made a point of stating
that he started painting the Grande Jatte as soon
as he finished Bathing, thereby perhaps intimat-
ing that the former was, in some broad sense, a
continuation of the latter.
17. Art historians who have interpreted the simi-
larities of locale and subject matter between the
two paintings in more socioeconomic terms
include John House, “Meaning in Seurat’s Figure
Paintings,” Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980):
345–356, revised and republished as “Interpreting
Seurat’s Figure Paintings,” in Paul Smith, ed.,
Seurat Re-Viewed; and Hollis Clayson, “The
Family and the Father: The Grande Jatte and Its
Absences,” The Art Institute of Chicago Museum
Studies 14, no. 2 (1989): 155–164, reprinted in
Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed.
18. Blanc, Grammaire, 74, 80, and 92.
19. See, for example, Robert Herbert, “Seurat and
the Making of La Grande Jatte,” in Herbert et al.,
Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 107.
20. Henry Fevre, “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,”
La Revue de demain, May-June 1886, 149; Alfred
Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” Paris, June 5,
1886; Émile Hennequin, “Notes d’Art—Les
Impressionnistes,” La Vie moderne, June 19, 1886,
390; “Les Vingtistes Parisiens,” L’Art moderne,
June 27, 1886, 204; J. Le Fustec, “Exposition de
la Société des Artistes Indépendants,” Journal
des artistes, August 22, 1886, 282; Louis-Pilate
de Brinn Gaubast, “L’Exposition des artistes
indépendants,” Le Décadent, September 18, 1886;
and Émile Verhaeren, “Georges Seurat,” La
Société nouvelle, April 30, 1891, 431.
21. “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” La
République française, May 17, 1886, 3; “Beaux-
Arts—Les artistes indépendants,” La Petite
République française, May 21, 1886, 2; and Alfred
Cherie, “Les Indépendants,” Moniteur des Arts,
August 27, 1886.
22. Degas is quoted in Herbert et al., Georges
Seurat, 1859–1891, 174; Paul Adam, “Peintres
Impressionnistes,” Revue Contemporaine litteraire,
politique, et philosophique, April 1886, 550; Tout
Paris, “Les Artistes Indépendants,” Le Gaulois,
August 19, 1886, 2; Émile Verhaeren, “Le Salon
des Vingt à Bruxelles,” La Vie moderne, February
26, 1887. Indeed, Seurat’s interest in David’s Oath
of the Horatii might also be understood in the
context of his engagement with the “primitive”
 style of early Renaissance painting, given the
perceived similarities between the spatial struc-
ture of the Oath and quattrocento painting.
On this last point, see Fried, Absorption and
Theatricality, 239, n. 102.
23. Maurice Hermel, “L’Exposition de Peinture
de la rue Laffitte,” La France libre, May 28,
1886 Paul Adam, “Les Artistes Indépendants,”
La Vogue, September 6–13, 1886, 262; Charles
Vignier, “L’Exposition des Indépendants,” La
Vie moderne, September 18, 1886, 604; Paul
Adam, “Les Impressionnistes à l’Exposition des
Indépendants,” La Vie moderne, April 15, 1888,
229; and Émile Verhaeren, “Le Salon des Vingt à
Bruxelles,” La Vie moderne, February 26, 1887, 138.
24. Seurat’s reported comment is conveyed by
Kahn in “Exposition Puvis de Chavannes,” La
Revue independante, January 1888, 142–143. Like
many other critics, Kahn characterizes both
Neo-Impressionism and Puvis in terms of the
“hieraticism” of their work. Discussions of the
influence of various early or pre-Renaissance
sources on Seurat can be found, for example,
in Albert Boime’s essay “Seurat and Piero della
Francesca,” Art Bulletin 47 (June 1965): 265–71.
See also Mary Gedo’s “The Grande Jatte as the
Icon of a New Religion: A Psycho Iconographic
Interpretation,” The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum Studies 14, no. 2 (1989), 229–230, and
Robert Herbert, Georges Seurat: The Drawings
(New York: Shorewood, 1962), 110–116. On
Seurat and Puvis, see Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat,”
in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, (New
York: G. Braziller, 1978), 101–109 and Robert
Herbert, “Seurat and Puvis de Chavannes,” Yale
Art Gallery Bulletin 25, no. 2 (October 1959): 22–29.
25. Herbert et al., Seurat and the Making of “La
Grande Jatte,” 107. Ernst Bloch offered one of
the most well-known and earliest of twen-
tieth-century interpretations of the figures’
stiffness as a critique of contemporary socio-
economic conditions: The Principle of Hope, vol.
2, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul
Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986),
814. See also Stephen Eisenman, “Seeing Seurat
Politically” in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum
Studies 14, no. 2 (1989): 210–221; Linda Nochlin,
“Seurat’s La Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian
Allegory,” John House, “Meaning in Seurat’s
Figure Paintings,” and Joan U. Halperin, “The
Ironic Eye/I in Jules Laforgue and Georges
Seurat,” in Paul Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed; and
215 notes to pages 83–86
T. J. Clark’s conclusion to The Painting of Modern
Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1985). For a discussion of critical responses
to the Grande Jatte and a response to Clark’s
interpretation of them, see Martha Ward, “The
Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation,”
in Charles F. Moffett, ed., The New Painting:
Impressionism, 1874–1886 (San Francisco: The Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986): 420–442.
26. Herbert et al., Seurat and the Making of “La
Grande Jatte,” 113.
27. J. Le Fustec, “Exposition de la Société des
Artistes Indépendants,” Journal des artistes,
August 22, 1886, 282 and “Les Artistes
Indépendants,” La Liberté, May 18, 1886, 2.
28. His exhibition plans are discussed by Seurat in
his 1890 letter to Fénéon. The various stages of
Seurat’s work on the Grande Jatte are detailed
in Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley, “Seurat’s
Working Process: The Compositional Evolution
of La Grande Jatte,” in Herbert et al., Seurat and
the Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 178–195.
29. Aspects of this debate are summarized in
the first few pages of Roque’s essay, “Seurat
and Color Theory,” in Paul Smith, ed., Seurat
Re-Viewed. An illuminating, relatively recent
analysis of color vision and Neo-Impressionism
is found in chapter 11 of Margaret Livingstone’s
Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York:
Abrams, 2008), 164–187.
30. Émile Hennequin, “Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” La Vie moderne, September 11,
1886 and Félix Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,”
La Vogue, June 13–20, 1886, 271. It should be
noted that the distinction between colored light
and colored pigment, upon which the notion
of “optical mixture” rests, relies directly on
Helmholtz’s theories of additive and subtractive
color mixtures.
31. Ogden Rood, Modern Chromatics, Applications
to Art and Industry (New York: D. Appleton,
1879); reprinted by Faber Birren (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), 101.
32. For an explanation of Helmholtz’s place in
the history of the science of color vision,
see Richard L. Kremer, “Innovation through
Synthesis: Helmholtz and Color Research,” in
David Cahan, ed., Hermann von Helmholtz and
the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
205–258 and Paul D. Sherman, Colour Vision in
 the Nineteenth Century: The Young-Helmholtz-
Maxwell Theory (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1981).
Although largely overlooked in the secondary
literature on Neo-Impressionism, Émile Zola’s
1886 novel L’Oeuvre offers important insight into
contemporary perceptions of Neo-Impressionist
painting and the relationality of color. See my
essay “‘One Art Eating the Other’ in Émile Zola’s
L’Oeuvre,” in James H. Rubin and Olivia Mattis,
eds., Rival Sisters, Art and Music at the Birth of
Modernism, 1815–1915 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate,
2014).
33. Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme,”
L’Émancipation sociale, April 3, 1887.
34. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste
simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets
colorés, consideré d’après cette loi (Paris: Pitois-
Levrault, 1839). To give an example of simul-
taneous contrast, a red square placed next to a
blue square will look different than if the same
red square were seen next to a yellow square,
because each color draws out its complementary
in the neighboring color. When red is placed
next to blue, it will appear more orange (and the
blue will appear more green), whereas red placed
next to yellow will appear more purple (and the
yellow will look more green). With regard to
successive contrast, if we look, for example, at a
red square and then avert our gaze, we experi-
ence an after-image of green, the complemen-
tary color of red. An example of mixed contrast
would be if we looked at a red square and then
shifted our gaze to look at a blue square; the
latter would be affected by the after-image of the
red and look more green.
35. Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Optics to
Painting,” 299.
36. Other scholars who have addressed Helmholtz’s
analysis of Chevreul’s theories of complemen-
tary contrast are Jean-Claude Lebensztejn in
“L’optique du peintre (Seurat avec Helmholtz),”
and Georges Roque in “Chevreul and
Impressionism: A Reappraisal.” See also Roque’s
Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres,
de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Paris: Gallimard,
2009). Meyer Schapiro is one of the few to
articulate this important discrepancy between
Chevreul’s theories, in which the scientist
explained the effects that naturally occur in the
eye, and the Neo-Impressionists’ inclusion of
colors in their paintings that represent these
already naturally occurring effects. Like me,
216 notes to pages 88–95
Schapiro understands Seurat’s incorporation of
these optical effects into his works as a means
of representing the processes and mechanisms
of perception itself to the viewer. See Schapiro
in Problèmes de la couleur, 248–250. Alan Lee also
addresses the discrepancy between Chevreul
and Seurat, but attributes it to Seurat’s poor
understanding of Chevreul’s work. “Seurat
and Science,” Art History 10, no. 2 (June 1987):
203–226.
37. Helmholtz referred to these sensory units as
nonspatial points of sensation. I thank Gary
Hatfield for suggesting this connection to me.
38. Émile Hennequin, “L’Exposition des artistes
indépendants,” La Vie moderne, September 11,
1886; Marcel Fouquier, “Les Impressionnistes,”
Le XIXe siècle, May 16, 1886.
39. Among the definitions listed for “coin” are:
“an angle or meeting point between two lines
or two surfaces, be they indoors or outdoors”
and “a particular view.” Pierre Larousse, Grand
dictionnaire universel du XIXème siecle (Paris:
Administration du grand dictionnaire universel,
1869), IV, Première partie, CHEM–COLL.
40. Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women
and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria:
Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
41. Richard Thomson addresses the debates about
whether the painting depicts the same figure
or three different figures in his book Seurat
(Oxford: Phaidon, 1985).
42. Arsène Alexandre, “La semaine artistique,” Paris,
March 26, 1888; “L’Exposition des Indépendants,”
La Paix, April 4, 1888; P. M. O., “Les XX,” La
Wallonie, 1889.
43. Gustave Kahn also interpreted the object on
the back wall as being an item of women’s
clothing or an accessory, writing that “on the
wall, on the floor [are the] hats, clothing, para-
sols of the models.” “Peinture: Exposition des
Indépendants,” La Revue indépendante, April 1888.
44. Rosalind Krauss argues for the centrality of
these same concerns regarding the absence
of three-dimensionality from strictly optical
information in Picasso’s Cubist paintings and
collages, which she situates, in part, in relation
to Helmholtz’s writings on depth perception.
Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William
Rubin and Lynn Zelevansky, eds., Picasso and
Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1992): 261–286. Krauss also writes
 that Picasso’s attention to the disjunction
between the flat, vertical field of sight and the
horizontal, spatially extended field of touch
was one of the most significant lessons that he
learned from Cézanne’s work. Along these lines,
one of the ways that Cézanne registered the
contingency and instability of visual perception
rooted in a mobile, corporeal observer was by
provisionally demarcating the edges of objects
with multiple, overlapping lines. This means of
conveying the uncertainty of our perception of
boundaries and edges is paralleled quite closely
by Seurat in the suggestion of a double wall
hinge behind the central model in Poseuses. For
more on Helmholtz’s theories of spatial percep-
tion in the context of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century French art, see also Gordon
Hughes, “Coming into Sight: Seeing Robert
Delaunay’s Structure of Vision,” October 102 (Fall
2002): 87-100.
45. Seurat once made a drawing after Ingres’s
Source, and Jules Christophe cited Ingres’s
painting in his discussion of Poseuses in his 1890
profile, “Georges Seurat,” Les Hommes d’aujo-
urd’hui, no. 368 (1890).
46. Seurat’s teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts was
Henri Lehmann, a student of Ingres who was
extremely close to his teacher. It was Lehmann
who, at Ingres’s funeral in 1883, laid a wreath on
his grave on behalf of all Ingres’s students. See
Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of His
Time, 26.
47. Émile Verhaeren, “Georges Seurat,” La Société
nouvelle, April 30, 1891.
48. In a review of the 1888 Salon des Indépendants,
Gustave Kahn described the frame of Poseuses
as a “polychrome interior frame, around white
casings of a large general frame isolated from
the canvas by this polychrome frame or so to
speak enclosure.” “Peinture: Exposition des
Indépendants,” La Revue indépendante, April,
1888. The first mention of Seurat’s experiments
with his frames appears in a letter from Pissarro
to Signac written in June of 1887, while Seurat
was working on Poseuses: “Yesterday, I visited
Seurat’s studio. His big picture advances. . . . It
will evidently be a very beautiful thing, but what
will be surprising will be the execution of the
frame. . . . It’s certainly indispensable, my dear
Signac. We will be obligated to do the same. The
painting is no longer at all the same thing in
white or any other material.” Pissarro’s letter is
217 notes to pages 96–103
published in English translation in Herbert et al.,
Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 377.
49. Poseuses is not the only picture in Seurat’s
œuvre to engage with the analogy between
picture frames and feminine accoutrements. As
I will discuss in the next chapter, Young Woman
Powdering Herself also prominently features
framed objects in the context of the subject of
female self-adornment. The association between
picture frames and feminine accessories was
a rather common one. For example, one late
eighteenth-century dictionary states the fol-
lowing in its entry for “bordure”: “the frames
of a painting, just like the finery of a woman,
should not attract the gaze by distracting one
too much from the object it embellishes; but
both should set off the beauties which they
decorate.” Quoted Jean-Claude Lebensztejn,
“Starting Out from the Frame (Vignettes)” in
Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media,
Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
118–141. In addition to the pictorially related
definitions of cadre, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie
des Beaux-Arts also defined the term as “met-
aphorically, the choice of the arrangement of
accessory objects that the artist places around
the principal scene of his subject.” Dictionnaire
de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Firmin Didot,
1864), II: 422–423. Jules Laforgue’s 1883 essay
“Impressionism” includes a similar analogy
between picture frames and female accessories:
“A green sunlit landscape, a white winter page,
an interior with dazzling lights and colorful
clothes require different sorts of frames which
the respective painters alone can provide, just
as a woman knows best what materials she
should wear, what shade of powder is most
suited to her complexion, and what color of
wallpaper she should choose for her boudoir.”
Published in Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism 1874–1904, 20. And Félix
Fénéon employs the term toilette in a discussion
of Seurat’s frames and borders in “Exposition
des Artistes-Indépendants à Paris,” L’Art moderne,
October 27, 1889.
50. “Il a en haut et en bas une bande bleu foncé
pointillé de violet, qui sert d’encadrement ou
plutôt de repoussoir. C’est le mot exact je crois.
Et c’est le secret des cadres peints de Seurat. Ce
que les Anciens mettaient dans leurs premiers
plans” (my italics). Correspondance entre Charles
 Camoin et Henri Matisse, ed. Claudine Grammont
(Lausanne: Bibliothèque des arts, 1997), 79.
This letter is incorrectly dated 1914 in Henri
Matisse: Écrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique
Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 93–94. I thank
Catherine Bock-Weiss and Joseph Rishel for
the information they shared with me about
Matisse’s ownership of this panel. It seems that
Matisse borrowed this work from Bernheim-
Jeune in September of 1915 and then paid for it in
installments. Stephanie D’Alessandro and John
Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago and Yale
University Press, 2010), 228–229. Didier Semin’s
excellent essay on Seurat’s borders and frames is
one of the few sources to analyze Matisse’s com-
ments on Seurat’s borders. “Notes sur Seurat et
le cadre,” Avant-guerre sur l’art (2ème trimestre
1980), 56.
51. For more on Matisse’s relationship with Signac
and Neo-Impressionism, see Catherine C. Bock,
Henri Matisse and Neo-Impressionism, 1898–1908
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1981; Yve-Alain Bois,
“On Matisse: The Blinding,” October 68 (Spring
1994): 61–121; and the first chapter of Bois’s
Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1990).
52. Clement Greenberg, “Seurat, Science, and Art:
Review of Georges Seurat by John Rewald,”
The Nation, December 25, 1943. Reprinted
in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg:
The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1,
Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–44 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 168.
Important studies of picture frames and bor-
ders in later nineteenth-century art include
Anthea Callen, “Framing the Debate,” in
The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique
and the Making of Modernity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000); Martha Ward,
“Impressionist Exhibitions and Private
Installations,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (December
1991): 599–622; Eva A. Mendgen, ed., In
Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850–1920
(Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1995); Isabelle
Cahn, “Les cadres impressionnistes,” Revue
de l’Art 76 (1987): 57–62; and Jean-Claude
Lebensztejn, “Starting Out from the Frame
(Vignettes)” in Deconstruction and the Visual
Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette
and David Wills. On the manufacture of frames
during this period, see John Payne, Framing the
218 notes to pages 105–109
Nineteenth Century: Picture Frames, 1837–1935
(Victoria, Australia: National Gallery of
Victoria, 2007).
53. Gustave Kahn, “Au temps du pointillisme,”
Mercure de France, April 1–May 1, 1924, 14.
54. Jules Christophe, “L’Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” Journal des artistes, September 29,
1889. Fénéon described the purpose of Seurat’s
painted borders in much the same terms as
Christophe’s: “These two Crotoy [seascapes] are
surrounded by a painted border on the canvas
itself. Such a device eliminates the bands of
shadow that would bring a sense of relief and
allows [Seurat] to color this frame as the execu-
tion of the painting proceeds.” “Exposition des
Artistes-Indépendants à Paris,” L’Art moderne,
October 27, 1889.
55. Didier Semin makes a similar point about the
transformation of the paintings into colored
surfaces by the painted frames, and about a
connection between this loss of depth in Seurat’s
pictures and the intended repoussoir effects
of the painted borders. “Notes sur Seurat et le
cadre,” Avant-guerre sur l’art (1980). For more on
the imperative that the classical frame be dis-
tinct both from the painting and its surrounding
environment, see Jean-Claude Lebensztejn,
“Framing Classical Space,” Art Journal 47, no. 1
(March 1988): 37–41.
56. Les dessins de Georges Seurat (Paris: Bernheim-
Jeune), 1928; The Drawings of Georges Seurat,
trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover,
1971), viii–ix.
57. This notion that the painting itself produces
the impression of complementary colors on the
frame, rather than the frame actually being col-
ored, helps to make sense of contemporary char-
acterizations of Seurat’s multicolored frames
as “white.” Fénéon, for example, referred to
Seurat’s painted frames as “theoretically white,”
by which he seemed to mean that the frames
were “originally” white or neutral, but had been
colored by “the complementaries emitted by the
bordering colors” in the painting itself. Félix
Fénéon, “Exposition des Artistes-Indépendants à
Paris,” L’Art moderne, October 27, 1889. Similarly,
an exhibition review by Paul Signac (pub-
lished under the pseudonym “néo”) described
the frames in the Neo-Impressionist room as
“white or skillfully achromatic.” “A Minuit—IVe
Exposition des Artistes Indépendants,” Le Cri
du peuple, March 29, 1888. See also Arsène
 Alexandre, “L’Exposition des ‘Indépendants,’”
Paris, March 21, 1890: “The case of Seurat is the
most curious. This artist is ceaselessly working
for innovation. When he is not looking for cer-
tain simplifications of drawing or certain har-
monies of color, his concern turns to the frames
themselves. Last year it was colored reactions
that were produced even on the white frames,
thus continuing the painting beyond the paint-
ing itself.” In another article, Alexandre criti-
cized what he saw as the absurdity of a painting
evoking its complementary contrasts on the
frame: “The pointillists [are] . . . already on the
path of exaggerating their own exaggerations.
Haven’t they succeeded in pursuing the colored
reactions of their canvas onto the frame? Soon,
it will be necessary for them, in order to be con-
sistent, to continue the reactions on the neigh-
boring canvases.” “Le Mouvement Artistique,”
Paris, August 13, 1888.
58. Félix Fénéon, “Le Néo-impressionnisme,” L’Art
moderne, April 15, 1888, 122.
59. A year later, Fénéon praised Seurat for ceas-
ing to paint the frame as if it were part of the
illusionistic scene: “This frame is theoretically
white, since it includes only the complementa-
ries emitted by the bordering colors. To these
normal reactions, Seurat added, already last
year, another element: the blue or the orange,
according to whether the light fell on the land-
scape from behind toward the front or from
front to back; one can only praise him for having
renounced these practices that admit the exis-
tence of the frame.” Félix Fénéon, “Exposition
des Artistes-Indépendants à Paris,” L’Art moderne,
October 27, 1889.
60. Some of the same ambiguity characterizes the
parergon, which, as Victor Stoichita describes it,
“is not only simultaneously on both sides of the
boundary line between inside and out. It is also
the boundary line itself. It confuses them with
one another, allowing the outside to be inside,
and the inside to be out, dividing them and
joining them.” Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware
Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
23–24. Seurat’s painted frames and borders man-
ifest these same kinds of uncertainties, ostensi-
bly serving as the dividing line between the image
and the outside world, but at times blurring this
distinction, and seeming to be part of one and/or
the other, but never very securely so.
219 notes to pages 109–120
61. Seurat left both Chahut and Circus unsigned
(though some sources incorrectly state that
the latter was signed on the back). Jean-Claude
Lebensztejn offers an illuminating discussion of
the possible relationships between artists’ signa-
tures and works in “Esquisse d’une typologie,”
La Revue de l’Art 26 (1974): 46–56.
3 Seductive Sights
Epigraphs. Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise
on Physiological Optics, trans. from the third
German edition, ed. James P. C. Southall, 3
vols. (Rochester, New York: Optical Society
of America, 1924–1925; reprinted Bristol:
Thoemmes, 2000), vol. 3, 30–31; Eugène
Rodrigues, Cours de danse n de siècle (Paris: E.
Dentu, 1892), 5.
1. Jules Antoine, “Georges Seurat,” La Revue
indépendante, April 1891.
2. Émile Verhaeren, “Les XX,” La Société nouvelle,
February 28, 1891 (my italics).
3. Félix Fénéon commented that “Parade de cirque
[is] interesting as an application to a night
[scene] of a method that strived for the effects of
day.” “Le Néo-Impressionnisme,” L’Art moderne,
April 15, 1888, 122. Jules Christophe described
the painting as “a curious attempt at a nocturnal
effect.” “Le Néo-Impressionnisme au pavillion
de la Ville de Paris,” Journal des artistes, May
6, 1888. Gustave Kahn discussed Parade in
terms of Seurat’s “new research on the effects
of gas [lighting].” “Peinture: Exposition des
Indépendants,” La Revue indépendante, April 1888.
4. Helmholtz, Treatise, vol. 3, 29 (my italics); 30–31.
5. Robert Herbert discusses the flattening of the
scene in chapter 10 of Seurat: Paintings and
Drawings. Jonathan Crary, in what is certainly
the most compelling analysis of Parade to date,
also notes the absence of depth cues in the
painting in Suspensions of Perception: Attention,
Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1999), 188–190. Like Crary, I under-
stand vision in Seurat’s work in relation to states
of cognition or being in the world. Likewise, my
explication of Seurat’s various notions of visual
engagement, and the analogy Seurat proposes
between the acts of producing and looking at his
pictures and other forms of sensory, cognitive,
and bodily experiences are broadly in line with
Crary’s view that aesthetic forms of contempla-
tion should not be considered in isolation, but
rather as part of “a field of attentive practices.”
 But the mode of mental, physical, and bodily
engagement that I have elaborated in relation to
Seurat’s seascape practice and his early figural
paintings, and which I will analyze in relation to
his drawings as well, is fundamentally different
from Crary’s notion of attention that involves
the screening out of certain stimuli or phenom-
ena in the external world.
6. Gustave Kahn, “Difficulté de vivre,” Le Symboliste,
October 15–22, 1886 (my italics). Le Symboliste
was a short-lived but important journal founded
by Kahn, Jean Moréas, and Paul Adam not long
after Moréas published the Symbolist manifesto.
7. A comprehensive source on this fair is Agnès
Rosolen, De la foire au pain d’épice à la foire du
Trône (Charenton-le-Pont: L. M., 1985).
8. Arsène Alexandre wrote that “this year, it is
gray borders that, one must admit, are of the
most disagreeable effect, but that, it seems,
marvelously isolate the painting.” “L’Exposition
des ‘Indépendants,’” Paris, March 21, 1890. Jules
Christophe described Seurat’s submissions to
the 1890 Indépendants exhibition as a “group of
new canvases in gray-blue frames.” “L’Exposition
des Artistes Indépendants,” Journal des artistes,
April 6, 1890. Another critic discussing Seurat’s
submissions to the Salon des Indépendants of the
following year stated that “he decided to paint the
frames of his canvases in a violet pointille that, it
appears, should continue the tone begun on the
canvas.” P. B., “L’Exposition des Indépendants,”
La République française, March 20, 1891. In a
review of the 1891 Salon des Indépendants,
Georges Lecomte wrote that Seurat’s seascapes
“shine brightly in dark frames.” “Le Salon des
Indépendants,” L’Art dans les deux mondes, March
28, 1891. Finally, Henry van de Velde referred to
Seurat’s late frames as “gray” in his obituary for
the artist. “Georges Seurat” La Wallonie, April 1891.
Although the border of Parade is painted over the
edges of the composition, it is likely that Seurat
added it immediately after the painting was com-
pleted. Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 309.
Both surviving preparatory works for Chahut, a
wood panel now in the Courtauld Gallery and
a small framed canvas in the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, have dark borders and/or frames, evi-
dence of their importance to Seurat’s conception
and working out of his final paintings. In fact,
it looks as if Seurat added a strip of wood to the
right side of the Courtauld panel to create space
for the inclusion of the painted border.
220 notes to pages 122–127
9. Émile Verhaeren, “Georges Seurat,” La Société
nouvelle, April 30, 1891; Henry van de Velde,
“Georges Seurat,” La Wallonie, April 1891.
10. Albert Lavignac, Le voyage artistique à Bayreuth
(1896), quoted in Robert Hartford, ed., Bayreuth:
The Early Years. An Account of the Early Decades
of the Wagner Festival as Seen by the Celebrated
Visitors and Participants (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 202; Mark Twain,
quoted in ibid., 150.
11. Apparently, the large numbers of French visi-
tors to Bayreuth during the 1880s were crucial
for the survival of the Festspielhaus in its early
years. See Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years,
188. Useful sources on La Revue wagnérienne and
French Wagnerism include Gerald D. Turbow,
“Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France” in
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed.
David C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1984), 134–166; Wagner
et la France (numéro spécial de La Revue musicale
[October 1, 1923]), facsimile (New York: Da Capo,
1977); and D. Hampton Morris, A Descriptive
Study of the Periodical “Revue wagnérienne”
Concerning Richard Wagner (Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen, 2002).
12. Eduard Hanslick, quoted in Hartford, Bayreuth:
The Early Years, 74.
13. Richard Wagner, quoted in Schivelbusch,
Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of
Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela
Davies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 218. For more on the “mystic abyss”
and the architecture of the Festspielhaus, see
Beat Wyss, “Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard
Wagner’s ‘Mystical Abyss’ at Bayreuth,” October
54 (Autumn 1990): 57–78 and Frederic Spotts,
Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
14. Arthur Pougin, Dictionnaire historique et pittor-
esque du théâtre et des arts qui s’y rattachent (Paris:
Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1885), 130.
15. Semper, quoted in Juliet Koss, “Invisible
Wagner,” in Anke Finger and Danielle Follett,
eds., The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On
Borders and Fragments (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press), 182. The inducement of per-
ceptual and spatial uncertainty at Bayreuth and
characterizations of it in terms of intoxication
and magic are discussed in Koss, “Invisible
Wagner,” and Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
 2010). See also Jonathan Crary’s important anal-
ysis of Wagner, Seurat, and visual illusionism in
Suspensions of Perception, 247–256.
16. The two visitors are quoted in Hartford,
Bayreuth: The Early Years, 100 and 78; Nietzsche
is quoted in Spotts, Bayreuth, 52. For more on
these figures’ interpretations of Bayreuth and
Wagner, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception and
Koss, “Invisible Wagner.”
17. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts
defines “bordure” as interchangeable with
“cadre,” and states that “the border does not only
serve to enhance the picture, it is at the same
time necessary for limiting and fixing the gaze
of the spectator on the painting” (Paris: Firmin-
Didot, 1864), II: 344–345.
18. Semin proposes a similar idea when he suggests
that the dissolution of perspective as a means of
holding the gaze of the viewer led artists such as
Seurat to develop other means by which paint-
ing can still “maintain its function of ‘trapping
the gaze,’ of a ‘lure.’” Didier Semin, “Notes sur
Seurat et le cadre,” Avant-guerre sur l’art (1980),
58.
19. In his Grammaire, Charles Blanc makes a direct
analogy between the repoussoir techniques of
landscape painting and those of stage design:
“The vigorous masses that painters sometimes
put in the foreground—they would be better
in the middle-distance—are called repoussoirs,
because their aim is to make the far-off objects
seem farther. To render the distances of his
landscape more luminous, Claude Lorrain took
care to place in the foreground tufted trees
with dark foliage, or ruins of vigorous tone,
which, in his picture, serve the same purpose
that side-scenes do for the stage of a theatre.”
Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin [1867]
(Paris: Henri Laurens, 1908), 558; Charles Blanc,
The Grammar of Painting and Engraving, trans.
Kate Newell Doggett (New York: Hurd and
Houghton, 1875), 143–144.
20. Wagner is quoted in Hartford, Bayreuth: The
Early Years, 29. Importantly, the ambiguity
between near and far is central to the definition
of “phantasmagoria” given in Pierre Larousse,
Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle: “A
magic lantern spectacle in which, by means of
certain artifices, one makes figures appear that
by turns seem to get nearer and further away”
(Paris: Administration du grand dictionnaire
universel, 1872), VIII: 93. For more on Wagner,
221 notes to pages 127–132
Adorno, and phantasmagoria, see Crary,
Suspensions of Perception.
21. Hugues Le Roux, Les jeux du cirque et la vie
foraine (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1889), 72.
22. Ségolène Le Men is an exception, devoting
significant attention to the painted canvas in the
background of Parade, though coming to very
different conclusions than I do about its mean-
ing and that of the painting as a whole. Ségolène
Le Men, Seurat & Chéret: le peintre, le cirque et
l’ache (Paris: Centre national de la recherche
scientifique, 1994).
23. Kahn, “Peinture: Exposition des Indépendants,”
La revue indépendante, April 1888, 161.
24. The painting of the balusters is discussed by
Robert Herbert in “Parade de cirque de Seurat et
l’esthétique scientifique de Charles Henry,” Revue
de l’art 50 (1980): 9–23. Herbert’s painstaking
identification of various elements in Seurat’s
painting by recourse to other images and
descriptions of the Cirque Corvi is extremely
useful. Nevertheless, it’s important to point out
that Seurat himself makes it nearly impossible
for his viewers to discern the identity of and
spatial relationships between many of the ele-
ments in the painted scene.
25. Hanneke Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective:
Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 58. Grootenboer exten-
sively analyzes the significance of flatness to
trompe l’oeil pictures in her study. Baudrillard
and Marin also discuss the antiperspectivalism
of trompe l’oeil painting in Jean Baudrillard,
“The Trompe-l’Oeil,” in Norman Bryson, ed.,
Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989):
53–62 and Louis Marin, “Representation and
Simulacrum,” in On Representation (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002): 309–319. Lastly,
Sybille Ebert Schifferer gives an illuminating
account of this subgenre of painting in “Trompe
L’Oeil: The Underestimated Trick,” in Deceptions
and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L’Oeil
Painting (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art, 2002). Evidence of the continued interest
in trompe l’oeil painting on the part of nine-
teenth-century French artists such as Ingres,
Courbet, and Manet is discussed by Adrien
Goetz in “Le siècle de l’illusion perdue,” in
Patrick Mauriès, ed., Le trompe-l’oeil: de l’Antiquité
au XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
 26. Baudrillard’s and Marin’s analyses are especially
thought-provoking in this regard.
27. Tamar Garb puts forward an in-depth but
very different interpretation of Young Woman
Powdering Herself in “Powder and Paint: Framing
the Feminine in Georges Seurat’s Young Woman
Powdering Herself,” in Bodies of Modernity: Figure
and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1998): 114–143.
28. An 1891 letter from Knoblock to Signac indicates
that she met Seurat in the mid-1880s: “He loved
me and kept me to himself for six years.” Quoted
in Maurice Imbert, Seurat: Le Crotoy, Amont,
trajectoire d’un tableau (Paris: l’Échoppe, 2011),
9. The document in which Knoblock refers to
Young Woman as “mon portrait” is reproduced
in ibid., 22.
29. I’m grateful to the staff at the Bibliothèque
nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Forney
for their assistance in dating the advertisement.
30. Jules Antoine, “Les peintres néo-impression-
nistes,” Art et critique, August 16, 1890; Émile
Verhaeren, “Georges Seurat,” La Société nouvelle,
April 30, 1891. Fénéon also situated Seurat’s work
in relation to Chéret’s posters in “Exposition des
Artistes-Indépendants à Paris,” L’Art moderne,
October 27, 1889. According to a few sources,
Seurat owned a collection of Chéret’s posters.
The relationship between the work of Seurat
and Chéret is discussed in Robert Herbert,
“Seurat and Jules Chéret,” Art Bulletin 40 (1958),
reprinted as chapter 10 of Herbert, Seurat:
Paintings and Drawings; Ségolène Le Men, Seurat
& Chéret: le peintre, le cirque et l’ache; and Le
Men, Jules Chéret: le cirque & l’art forain (Paris:
Somogy, 2002).
31. On advertising in Paris in the 1880s, see H. Hazel
Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and
Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 142–150, 156–
158, and 185–205. In terms of Seurat’s personal
connection to the world of consumer goods and
advertising, it’s worth noting that his uncle Paul
Haumonté was the founder and owner of a suc-
cessful Parisian department store called “Au Père
de Famille.” Although Paul died when Seurat was
about ten years old, the two had apparently been
very close. Jean Sutter, Recherches sur le vie de
Georges Seurat (1964), unpublished manuscript.
32. Other scholars have proposed that this frame
contains a mirror reflection of a painting. This
seems to me a less plausible interpretation,
222 notes to pages 133–142
though my arguments about the object’s
self-reflexive significance would still largely
apply.
33. Relatedly, the prominence given both to the
painted still life and to its frame in the upper
left, in conjunction with the painting’s subject
of feminine cosmetics and self-adornment and
the still life–like arrangement of objects in front
of Madeleine, all situate the work as a whole as
a meditation on supplements of various kinds.
That is to say, Seurat has made that which had
often been considered either literally or met-
aphorically peripheral to painting of central
importance here, shifting that which was tradi-
tionally seen as being marginal or secondary to
being of primary interest.
34. Robert Rey, La peinture française à la n du
XIXe siècle; Aviva Burnstock and Karen Serres,
“Seurat’s hidden self-portrait,” The Burlington
Magazine CLVI (April 2014): 240–242.
35. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel
du XIXe siècle (1867), III. See also, for example,
“Jupes Retroussées,” La Cravache Parisienne,
January 9, 1886, on the popularity and indecency
of the chahut.
36. Edgar Baes, article in La Revue belge, quoted in
“À Propos des XX,” L’Art moderne, March 29, 1891,
103. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn offers a compelling
analysis of the relationship between visibility
and desire in Chahut, particularly with regard to
the spectator in the lower right, in Chahut (Paris:
Hazan, 1989), 87.
37. Rodrigues, Cours de danse, 5; 21.
38. Jean Ajalbert, Paysages de femmes, impressions
(Paris: L. Vanier, 1887), 69–70.
39. René Dubreuil, “Sur les femmes de Jules
Chéret,” La Plume, November 15, 1893; Jules
Claretie,“Quelques opinions sur les affiches illus-
trées,” in ibid., 495; Germain Hédiard, L’Ache
illustrée, exposition E. Sagot (Paris: aux bureaux de
l’Artiste, 1892), 9.
40. Camille Lemonnier, “Quelques opinions sur les
affiches illustrées,” La Plume, November 15, 1893,
97; Raoul Sertat, “Merci à Chéret!,” La Plume,
November 15, 1893, 501; Georges d’Avenel, “Le
mécanisme de la vie moderne: la publicité,”
Revue des deux mondes, February 1, 1901, 657, 659.
41. See Charles Henry, Introduction à une esthétique
scientique (Paris: Revue contemporaine, 1885).
42. Félix Fénéon, “Exposition des Artistes-
Indépendants à Paris,” L’Art moderne, October
27, 1889; Arsène Alexandre, “Le Salon des
 Indépendants,” Paris, March 20, 1891; see
also Alfred Ernst, “Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” La Paix, March 27, 1891.
43. Victor Joze, La Ménagerie sociale: L’Homme à
femmes (Paris: P. Arnould, 1890), 2–3. Joze’s com-
missioning of Seurat for the cover was the first
but not the only instance of his collaboration
with French artists. Toulouse-Lautrec designed
three posters advertising Joze’s novels, and
Bonnard designed a book cover for him in the
early 1890s.
44. Joze, L’Homme à femmes, 24. Interestingly,
Legrand was also the name of a well-known late
nineteenth-century artist whose illustrations
of chahut dancers were enormously popular,
and who produced the images in the Cours de
danse n de siècle that I discussed earlier in this
chapter. Although the earliest of these images
don’t seem to have been published until 1891,
that is, the year after the publication of Joze’s
novel, it is possible that Joze knew of them and
decided to name the character who is painting
a chahut after him. For more on Legrand, see
Victor Arwas, Louis Legrand: Catalogue Raisonné
(London: Papadakis, 2006). Richard Thompson
was the first to argue that the character of
Legrand was based on Seurat, in Seurat (Oxford:
Phaidon, 1985), 214.
45. Joze, L’Homme à femmes, 16–18; 14. Although
Seurat’s relationship with Knoblock is generally
understood to have been kept secret from his
friends and family, it seems an unlikely coinci-
dence that both the fictional Legrand and Seurat
happened to have secret lovers, suggesting that
Seurat’s private life wasn’t actually much of a
secret. I analyze possible motivations for the
elision of this relationship from biographical
accounts of Seurat by his colleagues and friends
in “(Anti-) Biography and Neo-Impressionism,”
RIHA Journal 42, special issue “New Directions
in Neo-Impressionism,” July 2012.
46. Joze, L’Homme à femmes, 278–279; 25.
47. Honoré de Balzac, The Magic Skin (Hong Kong:
Forgotten Books, 2012, reprint of 1889 English
translation), 31–32; 153. For an interesting inter-
pretation of La Peau de chagrin in relation to
myths around the Renaissance artist Raphael
and nineteenth-century painting, see Marie
Lathers, ‘Tué par un excès d’amour’: Raphael,
Balzac, Ingres,” The French Review 71, no. 4
(March 1998): 550–564. I would point out that La
Peau de chagrin was published the same year as
223 notes to pages 142–149
Balzac’s renowned short story about painting,
Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, lending support to the
notion that ideas about the history and practice
of painting inflect La Peau de chagrin.
48. A quite extensive history of the Cirque
Fernando is given in Adrian, Histoire illustreé des
cirques parisiens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Bourg-
la-Reine: l’auteur, 1957), 91–112. With regard to
the continuity between the subjects of Seurat’s
late figural paintings, it’s worth noting the close
overlap between café-concerts, where the cha-
hut would be performed, and the circus. Not
only did the former often feature circus-type
acts but, for example, one of the most famous
chahut dancers of the day, La Goulue, performed
in 1889 at the Cirque Fernando.
49. Georges Lecomte, “Le Salon des Indépendants,”
L’Art dans les deux mondes, March 28, 1891;
Alphonse Germain, “À L’Exposition des
Indépendants—Néo-Luminaristes et Néo-
Traditionnistes,” Moniteur des arts, March 27,
1891.
50. In light of my arguments in chapter 1 regarding
the similarities between Seurat’s seascape series
and panoramas, it’s worth calling attention to
the shared circular structures of circuses and
panoramas. The architect Jacques Hittorff, for
example, designed both circuses and panorama
buildings in Paris, and some panorama buildings
in the city were later converted into circuses.
51. M. P. [or M. F.], “Le Salon des Indépendants,” Le
XIXe siècle, March 20, 1891.
52. Le Men, Seurat & Chéret: le peintre, le cirque et
l’ache, 28–31.
53. Christian Dupavillon, Architectures du cirque: des
origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Moniteur,
1982), 13 and 36.
54. An analysis of the self-reflexive potential of
painted curtains is found in Emmanuelle
Henin’s article “Parrhasios and the Stage
Curtain: Theatre, Metapainting, and the Idea of
Representation in the Seventeenth Century,” Art
History 33, no. 2 (April 2010): 248–261.
55. Eric Darragon discusses this mirror, includ-
ing the uncertainty of its existence in the real
Cirque Fernando, in his excellent essay on
Circus, “Pégase à Fernando: À Propos de Cirque
et du réalisme de Seurat en 1891,” Revue de l’Art
86 (1989): 44–57. Joan U. Halperin touches on the
mirror and its reflection in “The Ironic Eye/I
in Jules Laforgue and Georges Seurat,” in Paul
Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed.
 56. A. J. Dalsème, Le Cirque à pied et à cheval (Paris:
Librairie illustrée, 1888), 5, quoted in Darragon,
“Pégase à Fernando,” 48. Roland Barthes’s char-
acterization of the temporality of variety acts
(including circus performances) is illuminating
in relation to the alluring sense of instantaneity
and immediacy in Circus and Chahut. See “Au
Music-Hall,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette
Lavers and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2013).
57. Le Roux, Les jeux du cirque et la vie foraine, 214.
4 Sight and Touch in Black and White
Epigraph. Félix Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,”
La Vogue, June 13–20, 1886, 272.
1. The vast majority of Seurat’s drawings were
never exhibited during his lifetime, and thus
were not titled by the artist. French and English
titles are given for those drawings that he did
exhibit, and the rest are referred to only in
English.
2. T. de Wyzewa, “Georges Seurat,” L’Art dans les
deux mondes, April 18, 1891.
3. J. E. Schmitt, “Le Salon et la Peinture en 88,” La
Revue libre, May 1888.
4. Kalophile l’Ermite [pseudonym of Alphonse
Germain], “Exposition des Indépendants,”
L’Ermitage, April 15, 1892, 244.
5. See, for example, Robert Herbert, Seurat:
Drawings and Paintings (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001).
6. Gustave Kahn, “Seurat,” L’Art moderne, April 5,
1891.
7. Félix Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,” La Vogue,
June 13–20, 1886.
8. Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impres-
sionnisme [1899]. Translation of the 1921 third
edition in Floyd Ratliff, Paul Signac and Color
in Neo-Impressionism (New York: Rockefeller
University Press, 1992), 214.
9. Ratliff, 253; Signac, 111. Likewise, in recounting
Monet and Pissarro’s 1871 visit to London and
their discovery of Turner, Signac writes: “This
technique of multicolored touches . . . was next
displayed to them in the most intense and bril-
liant paintings of the English painter. It is this
device that makes these pictures appear to have
been painted not with common pastes of color
but of colors that have no material substance.”
Ratliff, 240; Signac, 88–89.
10. Ratliff, 243; Signac, 93.
224 notes to pages 149–161
11. The imperative to view pointillist painting
from a distance rather than from close up was
frequently mentioned in contemporary writ-
ings on Neo-Impressionism. To give just one
example: “Seurat and Signac have about twenty
canvases in their well-known manner, several
of which have a very pretty effect, provided
that one views them from a suitable distance.”
Marcel Fouquier, “L’Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” Le XIXe siècle, March 28, 1887.
12. Ratliff, 210; Signac, 39.
13. Jules Desclozeaux, “L’Exposition des artistes
indépendants,” L’Estafette, August 25, 1886, 2;
Langely, “Exposition des Artistes Indépendants,”
Paris-Moderne, September 23, 1886, 6; Alfred
Paulet, “La Vie artistique,” Le National, March
27, 1888; Henry Somm, “Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” Le Chat noir, April 7, 1888, 1098;
“Le Salon des XX—L’ancien et le nouvel impres-
sionnisme,” L’Art moderne, February 5, 1888. The
critics’ claim of a lack of identifiable style in
Seurat’s work is complicated by the artist’s deep
sense of paternity over the Neo-Impressionist
system. For more on this subject, see my article
“(Anti-) Biography and Neo-Impressionism,”
RIHA Journal 42, special issue, “New Directions
in Neo-Impressionism,” July 2012.
14. George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter
Scott, 1893), 89.
15. Pissarro is quoted in John Alsberg, Modern
Art and Its Enigma (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1983), 129; Jules Antoine, “Les Peintres
néo-impressionnistes,” Art et critique, August
16, 1890.
16. Roger Marx, “Les Indépendants,” Le Voltaire,
August 21, 1886.
17. Erich Franz’s insightful essay on Seurat’s
drawings also addresses the importance of the
conditions and limits of vision to these works.
See “Withdrawn Proximity: The Development of
Georges Seurat’s Drawings,” in Erich Franz and
Bernd Growe, Georges Seurat, Drawings (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1984): 51–91.
18. Gustave Geffroy, “Chronique: Pointille-
cloisonisme,” La Justice, April 11, 1888.
19. Charles Fremine, “Exposition des Artistes
Indépendants,” Le Rappel, March 27, 1887;
Charley, “Exposition des Indépendants,” Le
Télégraphe, March 23, 1888; Paul Bluysen,
“L’exposition des ‘Artistes indépendants,’” La
République française, March 21, 1890.
 20. Félix Fénéon, “Le Néo-impressionnisme,” L’Art
moderne, May 1, 1887.
21. Ratliff, 214; Signac, 46.
22. Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Thierry de Duve,
Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s
Passage from Painting to the Readymade
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 171, 172.
23. Oeuvres plus que complètes, vol. 1, ed. Joan U.
Halperin (Geneva: Dros, 1970), 510.
24. “Ouverture du Salon des XX—L’Instaurateur du
néo-impressionnisme, Georges-Pierre Seurat,”
L’Art moderne, February 7, 1892.
25. “Types d’artistes,” L’Art moderne, March 2, 1890,
66.
26. Gustave Kahn, “Seurat,” L’Art moderne, April 5,
1891, 107 (my italics).
27. Ibid. The construction of artists’ biographies
based on certain characteristics of their work
is certainly not new in the writings on Seurat.
Vasari, for example, did the same in his discus-
sions of certain artists in his Vite. See Philip
Sohm, “Caravaggio’s Deaths,” Art Bulletin 84, no.
3 (2002): 449–468.
28. Jules Antoine, “Georges Seurat,” La Revue
indépendante, April 1891, 89; Alphonse Germain,
“Necrologie—Georges Seurat,” Moniteur des Arts,
April 3, 1891, 554; Arsène Alexandre, “Chroniques
d’aujourd’hui: Un vaillant,” Paris, April 1, 1891,
1–2.
29. Alphonse Germain, “Necrologie—Georges
Seurat,” Moniteur des Arts, April 3, 1891;
Gustave Kahn, Les dessins de Georges Seurat
(Paris: Bernheim-Jeune), 1928. Reprinted as
The Drawings of Georges Seurat, trans. Stanley
Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1971), xi.
30. The owners of these drawings were identified in
the exhibition catalogue entries for these works.
Given how few drawings, relative to his total
production, Seurat exhibited, he might have
chosen to show these drawings in particular in
order to associate himself with figures such as
Huysmans and Caze or to draw attention to the
circulation of his drawings between himself and
other artists, critics, and supporters.
31. See Karl Buchberg, “Seurat: Materials and
Techniques,” in Jodi Hauptman et al., Georges
Seurat: The Drawings (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 2007), 40–41.
32. Kahn, The Drawings of Georges Seurat, ix.
33. The vast majority of Seurat’s preparatory
drawings were produced in conjunction with
225 notes to pages 161–196
A Bathing Place, Asnières and the Grande Jatte.
Seurat produced far fewer drawings for Poseuses,
and even fewer for subsequent paintings.
34. Gustave Kahn was one of the few critics to
mention Seurat’s use of color and other media
in some of his drawings: “A drawing (Eden
Concert) in which a woman is cooing a romance
on a stage. The drawings of Seurat are already
known, and in this one as in the others, [there
are] the fixed masses and the skillful gradations.
But why mix this black and white with colors.
The highlighting of the pink sash and the col-
oring of the sash seem to us pointless.” “La Vie
artistique,” La Vie moderne, April 9, 1887.
35. See chapter 4 of Terence Rees, Theatre Lighting
in the Age of Gas (Cambridge: Entertainment
Technology Press, 2004) and Frederick Penzel,
Theatre Lighting Before Electricity (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 56–57.
36. Georges Seurat, letter to Maurice Beaubourg,
in Robert Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1991). Indeed, artificial lighting was commonly
discussed in terms of its specific effects on the
eyes, including having a blinding or dazzling
effect. See, for example, Edmondo De Amicis,
Souvenirs de Paris et Londres (Paris: Hachette,
1880), 25–29.
37. Félix Fénéon, “Signac,” Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui,
no. 373 (1890).
Postscript
Epigraphs. François Coppée, “Sur la Tour Eiffel
(Deuxième Plateau),” in Oeuvres de François
Coppée, Poésies 1886–1890 (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1892),
132; Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The
Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 4–5.
1. See also E. M. de Vogüé, Remarques sur l’Exposi-
tion du centenaire (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie,
1889), 1–26.
2. Barthes, “Eiffel Tower,” 11, 9, and 10.
3. Coppée, “Sur la Tour Eiffel (Deuxième Plateau),”
132. In fact, Coppée was one of the signatories of
the famous protest against the tower published
in 1887.
4. The Sun Tower is discussed, among other places,
in Charles Maurice Braibant, Histoire de la Tour
Eiffel (Paris: Plon, 1964), 61–62.
5. John S. Ellis and Claude Tahiani, “Patents of
Gustave Eiffel,” Journal of Structural Engineering
113, no. 3 (March 1987): 546–556.
 6. Eiffel’s 1884 patent is discussed in ibid. Sources
that discuss the tower’s visual signaling and
telegraphic potential include Tour en fer de 300
mètres de hauteur destinée à l’Exposition de 1889.
Projet présentée par M. G. Eiffel, Extrait du Procès-
verbal de la séance du 20 mars 1885 de la Société
des ingénieurs civils (Paris: E. Capiomont et V.
Renault, 1885) and Gaston Tissandier, La Tour
Eiffel de 300 mètres: description du monument, sa
construction, ses organes mécaniques, son but et son
utilité (Paris: G. Masson, 1889).
7. L’Exposition de Paris de 1889, Journal Hebdomadaire,
no. 14 ( June 1, 1889): 107. For more on the lantern
at the top of the tower, see Michel Lyonnet du
Moutier, L’aventure de la Tour Eiffel: réalisation et
nancement (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,
2009), 82–83 and Gustave Eiffel and Bertrand
Lemoine, The Eiffel Tower: The Three-Hundred
Meter Tower (Taschen, 2008).
8. Edmond de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt:
Mémoires de la vie littéraire, tome 8ème (1889–
1891) (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1895),
51; Gustave Eiffel, La Tour Eiffel en 1900 (Paris:
Masson, 1902), 256.
9. Contemporary accounts of these experiments
can be found in Reynaud, Mémoire sur l’éclairage
et le balisage des côtes de France (Paris: Imprimerie
impériale, 1864) and Allard, Les Phares: Histoire,
Construction, Eclairage (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1889).
The history and activities of the Lighthouse
Depot are discussed in detail in George H. Elliot,
European Light-House Systems: Being a Report of a
Tour of Inspection Made in 1873 (New York: D. Van
Nostrand, 1875) and Vincent Guigueno, Au ser-
vice des phares: la signalisation maritime en France
XIXe–XXe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires
de Rennes, 2001).
10. See, for example, Tour en fer de 300 mètres de hau-
teur destinée à l’Exposition de 1889. Projet présentée
par M. G. Eiffel, 1885, and Tissandier, La Tour
Eiffel de 300 mètres.
11. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass
Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
ch. 3.

226 notes to pages 196–203

 index
Note: Page numbers in italic type
indicate illustrations.
Adam, Paul, 56, 84–85, 208n27,
213n5, 220n6
Adorno, Theodor, 129
advertisements, 114, 118, 118–19, 132,
134, 137, 137–38, 143–44
Ajalbert, Jean, 66, 76, 143
Alexandre, Arsène, 96, 145, 175,
219n57
Alexis, Paul, 145. See also Paul Alexis
Allard, Émile, 207n21
Aman-Jean, 155–58, 156, 162, 172,
175, 177
Aman-Jean as Pierrot, 153, 153, 194
Anaïs Faivre Haumonté on Her
Deathbed, 176, 177–78
Angrand, Charles, 7, 172
Antoine, Jules, 7, 114, 116, 137, 175
art history. See pictorial conven-
tions and the history of art
The Artist’s Mother, 181, 182
Asnières, 79. See also A Bathing
Place, Asnières
At the Concert Européen, 113, 190,
190–92, 194–95
At the Concert Parisien, 192, 193
At the Divan Japonais, 113, 190–91, 191
At the Gaîté Rochechouart, 113, 190,
190–91, 194–95
Balzac, Honoré de, La Peau de cha-
grin, 147–48, 223n47
Barthes, Roland, 197, 199, 211n47,
224n56
Bartholdi, Auguste, 201
A Bathing Place, Asnières, 4, 73, 79,
79–80, 80 (detail), 82, 113, 118, 121,
123, 183, 185, 214n16
Baudelaire, Charles, 209n31
Bayreuth, opera in, 126–30, 127,
128, 195
beaconage. See lighthouses; mari-
time signaling technology
Beaubourg, Maurice, 34, 37, 66, 66,
73, 100, 196–97, 209n32, 210n35
The Bec du Hoc (Grandcamp), 12, 13,
56, 205n2
binocular vision/disparity, 22,
24–25, 74, 75, 206n19, 207n23
Blanc, Charles, 213n6; Grammaire
des arts du dessin, 70–72, 83,
207n20, 221n19. See also Musée
des copies, Paris
Bloch, Ernst, 215n25
Boats, 10, 10–11
Bonnard, Pierre, 223n43
borders of art works. See frames,
borders, and edges
Botticelli, Sandro, Allegory of
Spring, 95 (detail). See also Three
Graces
Bourdais, Jules, Design for a monu-
mental lighthouse for Paris, 200,
200–201
Brecht, Bertolt, 129
Brest, 9
Brewster, David, 26
The Bridge of Courbevoie, 80, 82,
105, 106
Cabot Perry, Lilla, 30–31
café-concert, 113, 146, 180, 190–96,
223n48, 224n56. See also popular
entertainments
Café Singer, 180
Carriage Driver, 165, 166
Caze, Robert, 177
Cézanne, Paul, 208n27, 217n44
Chahut, 4–5, 113–14, 115, 116, 123,
125, 135, 137–38, 141–47, 149, 187,
205n6, 219n61, 220n8, 224n56
chahut (dance), 141–43, 147, 223n48
The Channel of Gravelines, An
Evening, 36, 57–58, 59
The Channel of Gravelines, Direction
of the Sea, 57–58, 59, 60
The Channel of Gravelines, Grand
Fort Philippe, 57, 58
The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort
Philippe, 57, 57–58, 60
Chéret, Jules, 137–38, 143–44
Chevreul, Michel-Eugène, 90–91,
110, 216n36
child, motif of, 60–61, 74, 214n11
Christophe, Jules, 34, 56, 76, 108,
173, 219n3
Circus, 4–5, 113–14, 116, 117, 123, 125,
137–38, 143–44, 148–53, 219n61
Cirque Corvi, 116, 118–20, 118, 119,
124–25, 129, 131–32, 134. See also
Parade; Parade de cirque; Sketch of
the Entrance to the Cirque Corvi
Cirque Fernando, 149, 152, 223n48,
223n55. See also Circus
cognition: 2–5, 20–25, 27–28, 30–31,
33, 35–37, 43, 45, 49–53, 58, 60–61,
68, 71–72, 74–76, 78, 80, 82, 87,
92, 94, 96–98, 118, 120–25, 127–
29, 134–35, 138, 141–44, 147–49,
152–53, 163, 165, 167–73, 192, 194,
199–200, 207n23, 208n28
coin, 34, 94
colored chalk, 195–96
color perception, 8, 20, 58, 63, 65,
74, 89–92, 196, 215n30, 216n34.
See also optical mixture;
Chevreul, Michel-Eugène;
complementary colors
complementary colors, 90–91,
110, 125–26, 218n57. See also
Chevreul, Michel-Eugène
Condolences, 175, 176, 177, 187–89
conté crayon, 156–58, 162–64, 167,
180, 195
Coppée, François, 197, 199, 200,
225n3
Coquiot, Gustave, 9
Corner of a Basin, Honeur, 18–19,
21, 94
cover of L’Exposition de Paris de 1889,
201, 202
croqueton, 67, 177–78, 197
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884) (Albright-
Knox Art Gallery), 67, 67
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884) (Musée
d’Orsay), 67, 67
Croqueton (Study for A Sunday on
the Grande Jatte—1884) (National
Gallery, London), 67, 67
croquis, 213n3
Cross, Henri-Edmond, 7
curtain, motif of, 3, 135, 149–53
Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé,
41–43; Boulevard du Temple, 179
(detail), 179–80; Diorama of an
Alpine Scene, 42; Diorama of an
Alpine Scene II, 42
David, Jacques-Louis, 214n8; Oath
of the Horatii, 72, 72–73, 213n8,
214n22
Degas, Edgar, 29, 84, 187–88; Café-
Concert, 191, 193; Café-Concert at
the Ambassadeurs, 191, 192; Dance
Rehearsal on the Stage, 188, 189
Delécluze, Étienne-Jean, 41
Denis, Maurice, Spots of Sunlight on
the Terrace, 214n11
depth. See space, perception of;
space, representation of; picto-
rial illusionism
Desclozeaux, Jules, 160
228
desire: advertising and, 134, 137–38,
143–44; in Balzac’s La Peau de
chagrin, 147–48; chahut (dance)
and, 142–43; in Joze’s L’Homme à
femmes, 146–47; Seurat’s paint-
ings and, 5, 123, 134–35, 137–39,
141–43, 145; vision and, 123, 135, 141
diorama, 41–43, 211n47
disorientation, 2–5, 123, 127, 129, 134,
142, 147, 196. See also cognition;
hypnotization; reason, defiance
of; unintelligibility, of visual
experience
drawings, 5, 155–96; after plaster
casts, 185; critical reception of,
157–58, 162, 164, 175, 180, 225n34;
execution of, 156–57, 161–64, 167,
170, 177, 180, 183, 185, 195; exhi-
bition of, 5, 157–59, 168, 175, 177,
182, 187–88, 190, 194, 196, 224n1,
225n30; frames, borders, and
edges of, 157, 169, 177; interpreta-
tions of, 2, 158–59; intimacy and
size of, 155–56, 161–62, 175, 177–
79; light and dark in, 5, 157–58,
163–64, 168, 171, 177, 181–83, 195–
96; of manual activities, 155–56,
165–73; materials of, 156–57, 163,
165, 180, 195–96; paintings com-
pared to, 2, 5, 156–59, 161–63, 173,
175, 177, 183; photographs com-
pared to, 179–82; pointillism and,
158, 161–62, 173, 177; preparatory,
183–87, 225n33; representation
of space in, 155, 182–83; time and
temporality in, 156, 168, 179; titles
of, 224n1; vision and, 155–59, 161,
163–65, 167–72, 181, 183, 187, 196
Duchamp, Marcel, 173
Durand-Ruel, Paul, 29, 32–33
École des Beaux-Arts, 9, 26, 70, 99,
165, 213n6, 214n8, 217n46
Eden Concert, 194, 195
edges of art works. See frames, bor-
ders, and edges
Egyptian art, 63, 84–85
Eiffel, Gustave, 200–201, 203
Eiffel Tower, 5, 40, 197–203, 211n47
Eiel Tower, 5, 40, 197, 198, 199–200,
203
Embroidery, 168, 168, 170–71, 181
index
Entrance to the Port of Honeur, 14,
14–15, 19, 35
ephemeral effects. See transient
effects
étude/morceau, 31–32, 34–35, 37–38,
67–68, 96–97, 100, 197
exhibition practices and group-
ings: of Seurat, 3, 7–8, 33–34,
49, 54–55, 67, 80, 101, 113, 116, 133,
135, 141, 157–59, 172, 177, 187–96,
209n32, 212n55, 224n1, 225n30;
of Monet, 32–33, 43. See also
frames, borders, and edges
fair, itinerant/fairground, 129,
133, 187–88. See also Foire du
Trône/Foire au pain d’épice
(Gingerbread Fair)
The Fair Performer, 177, 187–88, 188
Fénéon, Félix, 196, 214n16, 215n28;
on the Grande Jatte, 1, 63,
75, 172; Henry and, 144; on
Impressionism, 30, 211n50;
Matisse and, 105; on Monet,
207n25, 211n46; on pointillism/
Neo-Impressionist painting, 1,
89–90, 155, 159–61, 172–73; on
Parade de cirque, 219n3; on sea-
scapes, 145; on Seurat’s frames
and borders, 110, 217n49, 218n54,
218n57, 219n59
flâneur, 33, 209n31
flatness, of images. See space, rep-
resentation of
Foire du Trône/Foire au pain
d’épice (Gingerbread Fair), 113,
116, 124, 130, 131. See also Cirque
Corvi
foreshortening. See pictorial
illusionism
The Fort Samson (Grandcamp), 11,
11, 205n2
Fouquier, Marcel, 34, 56, 92
frames, borders, and edges, 3–4,
101–11; of A Bathing Place,
Asnières, 79; complementary
colors on, 218n57; of the draw-
ings, 157, 169, 177; and femi-
nine accoutrements, 217n49;
Fénéon on 110, 217n49, 218n54,
218n57, 219n59; functions of,
106, 108–10, 218n54, 219n59,
219n60; of the Grande Jatte,
73, 77, 79, 102; Greenberg on,
105; Kahn on, 106, 108–10; of
landscape paintings, 38, 41, 105;
Matisse on, 104–5, 125; origins
of Seurat’s experimentation
with, 102–3; and panoramas,
39–41; of Parade de cirque, 125,
220n8; Pissarro on 217n48; of
Poseuses, 96–97, 102–4, 217n48;
of seascapes, 10–11, 13, 36; sig-
natures on, 110–11; and spatial
illusionism, 104–6, 108–10, 125,
129; staging of Wagnerian opera
compared to, 126–29; value con-
trast in, 125–27, 129, 220n8; of
Young Woman Powdering Herself,
140–41
Fresnel, Augustin, 26, 60
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 104–5
Gampenrieder, Karl, At the Circus,
150, 150–52
Garnier, Jules-Arsène, Panorama of
Constantinople, 39, 40
Geffroy, Gustave, 29–30, 64
Germain, Alphonse, 175, 212n56
Gillot paper, 180
Gingerbread Fair. See Foire du
Trône/Foire au pain d’épice
Goncourt, Edmond de, 201
gouache, 177, 195–96
Grandcamp, 9–13, 36, 56, 87
Grandcamp (Evening), 11, 13, 36
Grande Jatte. See A Sunday on the
Grande Jatte—1884
Gravelines, 36, 56–60, 209n33
Greenberg, Clement, 105
Grey Weather on the Grande Jatte,
105, 107
The Grues and the Percée, 45, 47, 48,
51, 211n48
Hanslick, Eduard, 127
Harbor Light at Honeur, 17, 18, 196
Haumonté, Paul, 222n31
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 2–4, 113,
206n11; on active vs. passive
perception, 49–50, 121–22;
on color perception, 20, 89,
91, 215n30; dissemination in
France of work of, 21–24,
 206n12, 206n18; language
and vision compared by, 37;
“On the Relation of Optics to
Painting,” 74–76, 91; and phan-
tasmagoria, 113, 121–22, 129;
on pictorial representation,
24–25, 74–76, 91; on spatial
perception, 20–25, 27–28,
49–50, 74–76, 87, 97, 121–22, 172,
207n23; Treatise on Physiological
Optics, 21
Hennequin, Émile, 83, 89, 92
Henry, Charles, 135, 144–45
High C, 113, 154 (detail), 190–92, 191
Hildebrand, Adolf von, 208n27
history of art. See pictorial conven-
tions and the history of art
history painting. See tableau
L’Homme à femmes, 111, 145–146, 146
Honfleur, 13–19, 16, 26, 27, 35, 35–37
horizon: in seascapes, 9–11, 36, 49;
in painting, 36, 41, 43, 71–72; in
panoramas, 39–41
Horkheimer, Max, 129
The Hospice and Lighthouse of
Honeur, x (detail), 1, 15, 16, 17–18,
35–36, 56
House Painter, 165, 166, 167
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 56, 177
hypnotization, 122, 124, 127–129,
142, 149, 192. See also cognition;
disorientation; reason, defiance
of; unintelligibility, of visual
experience
illusionism. See pictorial illusion-
ism; space, representation of
Impressionism: compositional
techniques of, 29; critical
reception of 31–32, 160, 208n27;
dioramas compared to, 42–43;
figures in works of, 65; model
of vision underlying, 27–29,
68; Seurat’s work or Neo-
Impressionism in relation to, 14,
27–28, 33, 48–49, 65–68; Signac
on procedures of, 159–60;
transient effects in, 14, 28–30,
32, 42–43, 48–49, 65–66. See also
Monet; Degas
incomprehensibility. See unintelli-
gibility, of visual experience
229
individuality, of artistic style,
160–61, 173–75, 224n13
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique,
98–99, 214n8, 217n45, 217n46;
Grande Odalisque, 98, 99; The
Source, 98, 99, 217n45; The
Valpinçon Bather, 98, 99
itinerant fair. See Foire du Trône/
Foire au pain d’épice
Japanese art, 141
jetties, 1, 14–15, 16, 17–18, 27, 35, 44,
44, 45, 46, 52, 211n49
Joze, Victor, 223n43; L’Homme à
femmes, 111, 145–47, 223n44,
223n45
Kahn, Gustave: on drawings, 158,
175, 180, 225n34; and the Grande
Jatte, 85; Henry and, 144; on
Neo-Impressionism, 48; obit-
uary by, 158, 174; on Parade de
cirque, 131, 219n3; on popular
entertainments, 122–23, 149,
192, 194; on Poseuses, 216n43;
on seascapes, 56; on Seurat’s
appearance and biography, 174;
and Seurat’s definition of paint-
ing, 25; on Seurat’s frames and
borders, 106, 108–10, 125
Knoblock, Madeleine, 54, 135–37,
174, 222n28, 223n45
Laforgue, Jules, 217n49
La Goulue, 130, 131, 223n48
Landscape—The Island of the Grande
Jatte (conté crayon), 68, 69
Landscape—The Island of the Grande
Jatte (oil), 68, 69, 85
landscape painting tradition, 37–38,
105, 125, 221n19
Le Crotoy, 54–56
Le Crotoy (Downstream), 34, 54–56,
55, 111, 145, 218n54
Le Crotoy (Upstream), 34, 54, 54–56,
102, 111, 145, 218n54
Legrand, Louis, 142, 223n44
Lehmann, Henri, 214n8, 217n46
Le Roux, Hugues, 129
Les Grues, 211n48
Lhote, André, 60
light, 5, 14, 36, 42–43, 58, 60, 86,
index
89–91, 120, 126–27, 134, 143, 157,
163–64, 170–71, 177, 181–82,
195–96, 200–201
lighthouses, 1, 5, 14–15, 17–18, 26,
27, 35, 52, 57–58, 60, 195–96, 200,
201, 202, 203. See also maritime
signaling technology
linear perspective, 4, 26, 37–38,
70–75, 92–94, 131, 133–34, 140,
207n20, 213n5. See also pictorial
illusionism; space, representa-
tion of
Lorrain, Claude, 37, 221n19
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 109
Man Dining, 177, 178, 190
Manet, Édouard, 221n25; Nana, 139
Man Leaning on a Parapet, 105, 107
Man Polishing Shoes, 165, 166, 179–80
The Maria, Honeur, 18–19, 20,
35–37; artist’s signature in, 111;
text in, 36–37, 111
maritime signaling technology, 5,
14–15, 18, 26–27, 51–52, 57–58, 60,
195–96, 201, 203, 207n21. See also
lighthouses
Marx, Roger, 34, 162
Matisse, Henri, 104–5, 125, 217n50
Maus, Octave, 49–50
Maxwell, James Clerk, 89
Michallet paper, 163
Mirbeau, Octave, 29, 32–33
mirrors, motif of, 3, 135, 139, 141,
149–52, 222n32, 223n55
Molyneux, William, and
Molyneux’s problem, 208n28
Monet, Claude, 27–33, 37, 43, 224n9;
Gare Saint-Lazare, 32; Poplars,
32; Regatta at Argenteuil, 31, 31;
Water Lilies, 32, 43; exhibition
practices, 33, 43; and vision,
28–31, 33, 208n28. See also
Impressionism
Moore, George, 161
Moored Boats and Trees, 104, 104–5,
125, 217n50
morceau. See étude/morceau
Moréas, Jean, 220n6
Morisot, Berthe, Young Woman
Powdering Herself, 139
motion parallax, 22
Mouth of the Seine, Evening, 18, 18, 36
Musée des copies, Paris, 213n6
mystification, 124, 127–29, 133. See
also cognition; hypnotization;
reason, defiance of; unintelligi-
bility, of visual experience
navigation, maritime, 9, 26–27, 45,
51–54, 58–60, 203. See also mari-
time signaling technology
Neo-Impressionism: conception
vs. execution in, 172–73; critical
reception of, 48–49, 66, 120,
159–62, 172–74, 211n50, 216n32;
frames and, 218n57; perceived
impersonality of, 160–61, 173–75;
Joze and, 145; and optical theory,
86–92; relationship of sight
and touch in, 92, 155, 159–61, 163,
172–73. See also pointillism
Nielsen, C. V., wood engraving
of Garnier’s Panorama of
Constantinople, 39, 40
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129
Nineteenth Line Infantry
Regiment, 9, 205n4
Nordau, Max, 129
Oath of the Horatii. See David,
Jacques-Louis
On the Balcony, 162, 162, 182
opera, 126–29, 127, 128, 195
optical mixture, 58, 63, 86, 88–89,
159–60, 215n30
optics. See color perception; mar-
itime signaling technology;
vision
Painter at Work, 155–57, 156
panorama paintings, 38–43, 199,
211n46, 211n47, 223n50
Panorama Rotunda in the Place
d’Austerlitz, Paris in Nouvelles
Annales de la Construction, 39, 39
Parade (conté crayon), 119–20, 120
Parade de cirque, 4–5, 112 (detail),
113–14, 114, 116, 118–25, 130–135;
border of, 125, 220n8; critical
reception of, 120, 131, 219n3;
exhibition of, 113, 116, 157, 187,
190; model of vision underlying,
121–25, 134, 219n5; nocturnal
setting of, 120; and pictorial
 illusionism, 130–35; Poseuses and,
116, 133–34, 187; and realism,
131; representation of paintings
in, 130–34; spatial structure of,
118–20, 129, 131–34, 219n5; and
spectatorship, 116, 120, 122; title
of, 205n6
parergon, 219n60
Parrhasius, 151
Paul Alexis, 169, 169–70, 175, 177–78,
194–96. See also Alexis, Paul
Paul Signac, 178, 196, 196. See also
Signac, Paul
Petit, Georges, 33
phantasmagoria, 86, 113, 121–22, 129,
221n20
Phidias, 85
photography, 179–82
Picasso, Pablo, 95, 216n44
pictorial conventions and the
history of art: Circus and,
150–52; the Grande Jatte and, 4,
65, 68, 70, 72–74, 76, 79, 82–87;
landscape painting and, 37–38,
105; late figural works and, 114;
Poseuses and, 95–100; seascapes
and, 26, 100; and spatial repre-
sentation, 125; window as met-
aphor for painting, 105–6, 134,
140, 151. See also self-reflexivity;
tableau; pictorial illusionism
pictorial depth. See space, represen-
tation of; pictorial illusionism
pictorial illusionism, 3–4; Circus
and, 150–52; of dioramas, 41–43;
and drawings, 163, 165, 183; and
foreshortening, 10–11, 77, 120,
133, 140; frames, borders, and
edges and, 101, 104–6, 108–11,
129, 219n59; the Grande Jatte and,
4, 65, 68, 70–76, 82–86, 92–94,
213n5; Helmholtz on optics and,
74–76, 91; linear perspective
and, 70–71, 74; of panoramas,
39; Parade de cirque and, 114, 120,
125, 130–34; pointillism and,
91–92; Poseuses and, 94–95; and
repoussoir, 105, 125, 129, 151,
221n19; seascapes and, 10–11,
25–26, 43; Seurat’s definition of
painting and, 25–26; and trompe
l’oeil, 132–33, 151; and window
230
as metaphor for painting,
105–6, 109, 134, 140–41, 151; and
Young Woman Powdering Herself,
140–41. See also space, represen-
tation of
Piero della Francesca, 85
Pissarro, Camille, 92, 161, 217n48,
224n9
Pointe de la Percée, 211n48
pointillism: criticism and scholar-
ship on, 1, 3, 8, 63, 65–66, 86–90,
158–61, 173–74, 224n11; drawings
and, 158, 177; and frames and
borders, 102, 105; in the Grande
Jatte, 63, 65, 86–87; perceived
impersonality of, 160–61, 173–74;
in Poseuses, 87–88, 102; and
signification, 37; and theories of
vision, 1, 8, 65, 86–92
popular entertainments: Kahn’s
criticism of, 122–23; visual and
mental experiences offered by, 2,
4–5, 113, 116, 120–25, 129, 142–43,
147, 149, 152–53, 191–92, 194;
world’s fairs as, 203; See also fair,
itinerant; café-concert
Port-en-Bessin, 44, 44, 45, 51–52,
46, 47, 53
Port-en-Bessin, A Sunday, 44, 46,
49–50, 53
Port-en-Bessin, Outer Harbor (High
Tide), 6 (detail), 45, 47, 48, 50–52,
102
Port-en-Bessin, Outer Harbor (Low
Tide), 45, 48, 52
Port-en-Bessin, The Jetties, 44–45,
45, 48
Port-en-Bessin, The Bridge and the
Quays, 44–45, 46, 48, 51, 60–61
Poseuses, ii (detail), 4, 88, 87–104,
98 (detail); critical reception
of, 97, 114, 217n45; exhibition
of, 101, 102, 113, 116, 133, 157, 187,
190; frame, borders, and edges
of, 96–97, 102–4, 109, 217n48;
the Grande Jatte reprised in, 87,
92–98, 100–102, 104; model of
vision underlying, 87–88, 92–96,
123; Parade de cirque and, 113, 116,
133–34, 187; as representation
of the artist’s oeuvre, 100–101;
self-reflexivity of, 87–88, 92–95,
index
100–01, 133–34, 140; spatial
structure of, 92–93, 97–98, 109;
studio setting of, 87–88, 96, 101;
relationship between sight and
touch in, 97–98; Three Graces
and, 95–96; title of, 96, 205n6
posters. See advertisements; Chéret,
Jules
Potin, Félix, 137
Poussin, Nicolas, 37–38, 213n8
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 85
Reading, 182, 182–83, 190
reason, defiance of, 2, 5, 123–24,
128–129, 133, 139, 141–42, 149, 153
Renaissance art, 63, 70, 84–85, 133,
213n6, 215n22, 223n47
repoussoir, 105, 125, 129, 151, 221n19.
See also pictorial illusionism
Reynaud, Léonce, 207n21
Ribot, Théodule, 22
The Roadstead at Grandcamp, 11,
12, 13
Rodrigues, Eugène, Cours de danse
n de siècle, 113, 142–43
Rood, Ogden, Modern Chromatics,
89
Rubens, Peter Paul, The Three
Graces, 95. See also Three Graces
Salon, 33–34, 155, 168
Salon des Artistes Indépendants,
33–34, 54–55, 68, 79, 110, 113, 135,
141, 148, 157, 177, 182, 190, 196
seascapes: café-concert pictures
compared to, 195–96; criti-
cism and scholarship on, 2,
7–8, 34, 48–50, 56, 59–60, 145,
157, 162, 209n33; compared to
figural paintings, 100–01, 121,
123; figures’ role in, 2, 8, 13–14,
50–51, 60–61; of Grandcamp,
9–13, 36, 56, 87; the Grande Jatte
compared to, 68, 71, 80, 82, 87,
100–101, 123; of Gravelines, 36,
56–60; of Honfleur, 1, 13–19,
26–27, 34–37, 56, 94, 111, 196;
of Le Crotoy, 34, 54–56, 111,
145, 218n54; locations for, 8–9;
Monet’s series of, 32; and nav-
igation, 9, 14–15, 17–18, 26–27,
45, 51–52, 54, 57–58, 60; and
perception, 1–4, 8, 10–11, 13,
25–28, 33–37, 43, 45, 49–52, 56,
58, 60–61, 80, 87, 91, 123; of Port-
en-Bessin, 44–54, 60–61; and
Poseuses, 94, 96, 100–101; text
in, 36–37; and time, 28, 33, 41,
48–49, 52–54, 68. See also series
The Seine at Courbevoie, 80, 81,
82, 123
self-reflexivity, 3; Circus and, 135,
149–53; of drawings, 163–65,
167, 169–70, 177, 183, 194–95; the
Grande Jatte and, 74, 82, 86–87;
Parade de cirque and, 130–35,
140; Poseuses and, 87–88, 92–95,
100–01, 133–34, 140; seascapes
and, 17–18, 25–26, 45, 82; Seine
at Courbevoie and, 82, 123; of
trompe l’oeil painting, 132–33;
Young Woman Powdering Herself
and, 135, 139–41. See also pictorial
conventions and the history
of art
semaphores, 51–52, 53. See also mari-
time navigation technology
Semper, Gottfried, 128
series, 7–61; and exhibition practic-
es, 7, 33–34, 55; of Grandcamp,
9–13, 56, 87; of Gravelines,
56–60; of Honfleur, 1, 13–19,
26–27, 34–37, 56; integrity of,
3, 7, 9; of Le Crotoy, 54–56;
logic of, 1, 3, 7–10, 14, 28, 55,
57; Monet’s work in, 27–28,
32–33, 208n30; and panorama
paintings, 40–41, 43; of Port-
en-Bessin, 44–54; and spatial
illusionism, 25–26, 43, 71, 91. See
also seascapes
Seurat, Georges, life of: artistic
training, 9, 99, 165, 185, 214n8;
aunt, 175, 176, 177–78; as basis for
character in L’Homme à femmes,
145–47, 223n45; biographical
accounts of, 9, 174–75, 223n45;
father, 177, 178, 190; Madeleine
Knoblock, 54, 135, 136, 137, 174,
223n45; military service, 9; moth-
er, 137, 168, 168, 170, 170–72, 175,
177–78, 181, 182, 190; obituaries, 7,
83, 100, 126, 148, 157–58, 174–75,
206n20, 220n8; uncle, 222n31
Seurat, Georges, oeuvre of: cohe-
siveness of, 2–3, 5, 100–101;
treatment of frames, borders,
and edges in, 101–11; and artist’s
definition of painting, 25–26,
206n20; painted over self-por-
trait in, 140–41; signatures in,
110–11, 169–70, 177. See also exhi-
bition practices and groupings
The Shore at Bas Butin, 18–19, 19
Signac, Paul: diagram by, 80, 82,
82; and Gampenrieder’s At the
Circus, 150; on the Grande Jatte,
72, 80, 82, 82; on Seurat’s inter-
est in Helmholtz, 21, 206n11;
Henry and, 144; Seurat’s letter
to, 18; Matisse and, 105; on
Neo-Impressionism, 159–61, 173,
218n57; portrait of, 178, 196, 196;
on Turner, 224n9. See also Paul
Signac
signatures, 110–11, 169–70, 177
simultaneous contrast, 90–91,
216n34. See also color perception
Sketch of the Entrance to the Cirque
Corvi, 130, 131
Skirt (Study for A Sunday on the
Grande Jatte–1884), 165, 165, 183
Société des Artistes Indépendants,
33–34, 55, 68. See also Salon des
Artistes Indépendants
space, perception of: binocular
vision and, 22, 24–25, 74–75,
207n23; bodily movement
and, 2–3, 22–25, 28, 33, 45, 50,
75, 80, 82, 96–97, 121–23, 200;
Helmholtz’s theories on, 2, 4,
20–25, 27–28, 49–50, 74–76, 97,
121–123, 172; seascapes and, 2–4,
8, 10–11, 25–28, 43, 45, 49–50, 58,
61, 80; Taine on, 21–24; vantage
points and, 2, 20, 22–25, 27–28,
49–50, 75–76. See also space,
representation of; vision
space, representation of: in Chahut,
114, 116, 142; Circus and, 114, 116,
149–52; conventions of, 3–4,
10–11, 26, 65, 70–72, 74–75, 85,
105, 120, 125, 131–133, 140, 151; in
drawings, 155, 182–83; frames,
borders, and edges and, 104–6,
108–10, 125, 129; the Grande
231
Jatte and, 4, 68, 70–76, 82–86,
92–94, 213n5; Parade de cirque
and, 114, 116, 118–21, 125, 131–34;
Poseuses and, 92–94, 96–98, 103,
109, 131, 133–34; in seascapes,
2–4, 11, 25–26, 43, 71, 82, 91;
Seurat’s definition of painting
and 25–26; Seurat’s exploration
of different techniques for,
3–4, 25–26, 43, 71, 73–74, 91,
101–110, 125, 129, 131–132, 151;
Young Woman Powdering Herself
and, 114, 116, 135, 138–141. See also
space, perception of; pictorial
illusionism
spectacles. See popular
entertainments
Statue of Liberty, 201
stereoscopic images, 25, 206n19
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(Fondation Beyeler), 183, 184
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(Musée du Louvre), 183, 185
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(National Galleries of Scotland),
185, 187
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(Nationalmuseum, Stockholm),
183, 185, 186
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(private collections), 183, 184,
185, 187, 187
Study for A Bathing Place, Asnières
(Yale University Art Gallery),
183, 185, 186
Study for Parade de cirque, 124, 125
Study for Poseuses (Musée d’Orsay),
102–3, 103
Study for Poseuses (private collec-
tion), 102, 102–3
A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884,
63–87, 64, 70 (detail), 77 (detail),
78 (details), 85 (detail), 86
(details), 87 (detail); A Bathing
Place, Asnières in relation to, 73,
79–80, 82, 121, 123, 214n16; bor-
der, frame, and edges of, 73, 77,
79, 102; child in, 61, 74; critical
reception of, 1, 63, 65–67, 75–76,
83–86, 212n1; David’s Oath of
the Horatii compared to, 72;
exhibition of, 63, 65–67, 80, 82,
index
86, 177; exploratory nature of,
4, 65, 86–87; figures in, 61, 63,
65, 68, 70, 73–76, 78, 80, 82–87;
in relation to Impressionism,
65–68; interpretations of, 4,
63, 65, 68, 73–74, 78, 80, 82, 85,
113; Landscape—The Island of the
Grande Jatte in relation to, 68;
reprised in Poseuses, 87, 92–95,
97–98, 100–102, 104; revision of,
65, 86–87; seascapes compared
to, 68, 71, 80, 82, 87, 100–101, 123;
Seine at Courbevoie in relation
to, 80, 82, 123; representation
of space in, 68, 70–76, 80, 82,
85–86, 92–94, 213n5; conven-
tions of tableau in relation to, 4,
65, 68, 71–74, 76–77, 79, 82–86;
technique and working process
for, 63, 65–68, 85–87; time and,
66–68, 76–77; title of, 66, 68, 80,
87; and vision, 1, 4, 63, 65–66, 68,
71–78, 80, 82, 86–87, 123
Sun Tower, 200, 200–201
tableau: autonomy of, 82, 96–97;
étude/morceau vs., 31–32,
37–38, 67–68, 96–97; figures
in, 82–84; frames of, 109; the
Grande Jatte in relation to, 4, 65,
67–68, 72–74, 76–77, 79, 82–86;
Impressionist works compared
to, 31–32; intelligibility of, 73, 76;
and landscape painting, 37–38,
105; and linear perspective,
71–72, 74; Poseuses in relation to,
93–94, 96–97, 101; vantage point
and, 74, 80, 93–94
Taine, Hippolyte, 21–24
telegraphy. See semaphores
temporality. See time and
temporality
text, in Seurat’s paintings, 36–37, 111
Three Graces, 95, 95–96, 98
tides, 45, 52–53
tide signals, 15, 18, 26, 35, 50, 51, 51,
57–58. See also maritime naviga-
tion technology
time and temporality: Barthes
on, 199, 224n56; dioramas and,
41–43; drawings and, 156, 168,
179; Grande Jatte and, 66–68,
76–77; in Impressionism, 29–30,
33, 42–43; measurement of,
53–54; in Neo-Impressionism,
48–49; panoramas and, 41; pho-
tography and, 179–80; Poseuses
and, 96; in seascapes, 28, 33,
48–49, 52–54; and standard uni-
versal time, 53
Tip of the Jetty of Honeur, 15, 15,
26, 205n7
touch: sight in relation to, 5, 92, 155,
157–60, 163, 165, 167–71, 187; and
spatial perception, 22–24, 92,
97–98. See also space, percep-
tion of; vision
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 130,
131, 223n43
transient effects, 14, 28–32, 36,
41–43, 48–49, 60, 65–66
trompe l’oeil, 132–33, 151. See also
pictorial illusionism
unintelligibility, of visual expe-
rience, 36, 50–51, 77–78, 116,
120–24, 132, 139, 149, 152–53, 163,
165, 221n24
Universal Exposition: of 1878, 40;
of 1889, 40, 201, 203; of 1900,
203
Valenciennes, Pierre-Henri de, 38
van de Velde, Henry, 126, 161, 220n8
vantage point: for A Bathing Place,
Asnières, 80, 82, 123; Circus and,
149; and drawings, 156, 162, 183,
185, 191; and Eiel Tower, 199–
200; the Grande Jatte and, 71–76,
78, 80, 82, 82, 123; and Neo-
Impressionist painting, 155, 160,
224n11; panoramas and, 39–41,
43; Poseuses and, 93–96, 101; and
seascapes, 1, 2, 11, 13, 15, 17–20,
25–28, 43–45, 55, 57–58, 87, 101,
123; and perception of space, 2,
20, 22–25, 27–28, 49–50, 75–76;
for Seine at Courbevoie, 80,
82, 123
The Veil, 164, 165
Verhaeren, Émile: on Chéret, 137;
on frames and borders, 126;
on the Grande Jatte, 63, 67,
83–85; on late figural works,
 116; obituary by, 83, 100, 126;
on seascapes, 7, 56; on Seurat’s
practice, 34, 100
View through a Balcony Railing,
163–64, 164, 182–83
Vignier, Charles, 84
Les XX (Les Vingt), 49, 194
vision: active vs. passive, 2, 4–5,
49–50, 121–23, 130, 135, 152–53,
172, 194; in Balzac’s La Peau
de chagrin, 148; binocular, 22,
24–25, 74–76, 207n23; Chahut
and, 2, 4–5, 116, 123, 135, 138,
141–44, 222n36; Circus and, 2,
4–5, 116, 123, 138, 149, 151–53; and
cognition, 2–5, 20–28, 30–31,
33, 35–37, 43, 49–52, 58, 60–61,
71–72, 74–76, 77–78, 80, 82,
87, 92–94, 97–98, 116, 120–24,
134–35, 139–41, 143, 149, 152–53,
165, 168–72, 194, 196, 199–200,
206n15, 207n23, 208n27, 208n28;
desire and, 5, 123–24, 134–35,
137–39, 141–44, 147–48, 153;
different models of in Seurat’s
work, 1–5, 65, 74, 86–87, 116,
123; drawings and, 5, 155–59, 161,
163–65, 167–72, 181, 183, 187, 196;
the Grande Jatte and, 1, 4, 61,
63, 65–67, 71–78, 80, 82, 86–87,
123; Helmholtz’s theories of, 2,
20–25, 27–28, 37, 49–50, 74–76,
91, 97, 121–122, 129; Impressionist
model of, 14, 28–33, 48–49, 66,
68, 208n27; linear perspective
and, 71–72, 74–75, 92–94; mon-
ocular, 25, 71–75, 82; and Neo-
Impressionism, 1, 37, 48–49,
86, 89–92, 159–60, 172–74,
215n29, 216n36; Parade and,
4–5, 116, 120–25, 129–30, 132–35;
Poseuses and, 4, 88, 92–100, 123;
232
seascapes and, 1–4, 8, 10–11, 13,
25–28, 33–37, 43, 45, 49–52, 56, 58,
60–61, 80, 87, 91, 123; and time,
28–30, 33, 41–42, 48–49, 52–53,
66, 68, 76–77, 156, 168, 180, 199;
touch in relation to, 5, 22–24,
92, 97–98, 155, 159–61, 163, 165,
167–173, 187, 207n24, 208n28;
Young Woman Powdering Herself
and, 4–5, 135, 137–39, 141; See also
space, perception of
Wagner, Richard, 126–30, 195
window: as metaphor for paint-
ing, 105–6, 109, 134, 140–41, 151;
as motif, 116, 118, 131, 134–35,
163–64, 182–83
Woman in a Carriage, 162, 162–63
Woman Opening Parasol, 165, 166
Woman Reading by Lamplight, 170,
170–71, 181
Woman Sewing, 167, 167–68
Woman with Black Bow, 178, 179
women, clothing or accessories of,
94, 97–98, 104, 165, 179, 216n43,
217n49
Wyzewa, Téodor de, 157
Young, Thomas, 89
Young Woman, 171, 171–72, 190
Young Woman Powdering Herself,
4–5, 135–42, 136, 138 (detail), 140
(detail), 144–45, 187, 217n49;
advertisements and, 114, 137–138;
artist’s signature on, 111; frame
and border of, 125; painted-over
self-portrait in, 140–41; repre-
sentation of space in, 114, 116,
135, 138–141
Zeuxis, 151
Zola, Émile, L’Oeuvre, 216n32
index
 illustration credits
Chapter 1
Private collection/Photo © Lefevre Fine Art Ltd.,
London/The Bridgeman Art Library (fig. 1); Hermitage,
St. Petersburg/The Bridgeman Art Library (fig. 2);
Private collection/Photo by Malcolm Varon, NY (fig. 3);
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY (fig. 4); © The
Museum of Modern Art, NY/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY (fig. 5); Image © 2014 The Barnes
Foundation, Philadelphia (fig. 6); © The Kröller-Müller
Foundation/Pictoright, Amsterdam (fig. 7); Courtesy
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (fig. 8);
Digital image © Collection of the author (fig. 9); Image
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (fig. 10); The
Museum of Modern Art, NY/Licensed by SCALA/Art
Resource, NY (fig. 11); © Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai/
The Bridgeman Art Library (fig. 12); National Museum,
Prague/Scala/White Images/Art Resource, NY (fig. 13);
The Kröller-Müller Foundation, Otterlo/Pictoright,
Amsterdam (fig. 14); Collection of the author (fig. 15);
Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Hervé Lewandowski ©
RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 16); Collection
of the author (fig. 17); Collection of the author (fig. 18);
Bibliothèque nationale de France (fig. 19); The Royal
Library, Copenhagen (fig. 20); Harry Ransom Center,
The University of Texas at Austin (fig. 21); Harry Ransom
Center, The University of Texas at Austin (fig. 22);
Digital image © Collection of the author (fig. 23); Digital
image © The Museum of Modern Art, NY/Licensed by
SCALA/Art Resource, NY (fig. 24); © The Kröller-Müller
Foundation/Pictoright, Amsterdam (fig. 25); Digital image
© Collection of the author (fig. 26); Minneapolis Institute
of Art. The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 55.38 (fig.
27); Digital image © Collection of the author (fig. 28);
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (fig.
29); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Hervé Lewandowski
© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 30); Digital
image © Collection of the author (fig. 31); Image and
original data provided by Saint Louis Art Museum (fig.
32); From: Memoire Upon the Illumination and Beaconage
of the Coasts of France, translated by Peter C. Hains
(Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing
Office, 1876), page 154. Translation of Léonce Reynaud,
Mémoire sur l’éclairage et la balisage des côtes de France
(Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1864) (fig. 33); From: Ville
de Port-en-Bessin: images souvenir. N° 1. Cully, France:
OREP, 2003. (fig. 34); From: Chambers’s Encyclopaedia:
A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, New Edition, vol. 9
(London and Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers,
1892), page 444 (fig. 35); Detroit Institute of Arts/Bequest
of Robert H. Tannahill/The Bridgeman Art Library (fig.
36); Private collection/The Bridgeman Art Library (fig.
37); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. James W.
Fesler in memory of Daniel W. and Elizabeth C. Marmon,
(45.195)/Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art (fig. 38);
© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY (fig. 39);
© The Kröller-Müller Foundation/Pictoright, Amsterdam
(fig. 40); Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art,
NY/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (fig. 41);
Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 42)
Chapter 2
© Private collection/Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits,
Paris (fig. 43); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Hervé
Lewandowski © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource,
NY (fig. 44); © Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY/
Art Resource, NY (fig. 45); © National Gallery, London/
Art Resource, NY (fig. 46); Private collection/The
Bridgeman Art Library (fig. 47); © The Trustees of the
British Museum/Art Resource, NY (fig. 48); Photography
© The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 49); Musée du Louvre,
Paris/Photo: Gérard Blot/Christian Jean © RMN-Grand
Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 50); Photography © The Art
Institute of Chicago (fig. 51); From: Robert L. Herbert,
Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte.” Chicago:
Art Institute of Chicago, 2004. Page 100, fig. 5 (fig. 52);
Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 53);
 National Gallery, London/The Bridgeman Art Library
(fig. 54); National Gallery, London/The Bridgeman Art
Library (fig. 55); Private collection/Scala/White Images/
Art Resource, NY (fig. 56); Photography © The Art
Institute of Chicago (fig. 57); Photography © The Art
Institute of Chicago (fig. 58); From: Robert L. Herbert,
Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte.” Chicago: Art
Institute of Chicago, 2004. Page 203, fig. 13 (fig. 59); From:
Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the Making of “La Grande
Jatte.” Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004. Page 111,
fig. 25 (fig. 60); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the
Making of “La Grande Jatte.” Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago, 2004. Page 100, fig. 6 (fig. 61); Image © 2014 The
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (fig. 62); Galleria degli
Uffizi, Florence/Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at
Art Resource, NY (fig. 63); Image © Museo Nacional del
Prado, Madrid/Art Resource, NY (fig. 64); Image © 2014
The Barnes Foundation (fig. 65); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/
Photo: Hervé Lewandowski © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY (fig. 66); Musée du Louvre, Paris/Photo:
Gérard Blot © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
(fig. 67); Musée du Louvre, Paris/Photo: Thierry Le
Mage © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 68);
© Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Brussels/Cliché
Doc AML (fig. 69); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat,
1859–1891. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Pages 288–289, fig. 188 (fig. 70);
Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Michèle Bellot © RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 71); The Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Gift of Jacqueline Matisse Monnier
in memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt, 2008 (fig. 72); The
Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
(fig. 73); Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
(fig. 74); Private collection/The Bridgeman Art Library
(fig. 75)
Chapter 3
Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
(fig. 76); © The Kröller-Müller Foundation/Pictoright,
Amsterdam (fig. 77); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Patrice
Schmidt © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 78);
Image Works (fig. 79); Collection of Le Deley Fernand
(fig. 80); Collection of the author (fig. 81); The Phillips
Collection, Washington, D.C. (fig. 82); From: Robert
L. Herbert, Seurat, 1859–1891. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Pages 312–313, fig.
201 (fig. 83); Stadtarchiv Bayreuth (fig. 84); Nationalarchiv
der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth (fig. 85);
From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat, 1859–1891. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Page 308 (fig. 86); Bibliothèque nationale de France (fig.
87); The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery,
234 illustration credits
London (fig. 88); Bibliothèque nationale de France
(fig. 89); The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld
Gallery, London (fig. 90); The Samuel Courtauld Trust,
The Courtauld Gallery, London (fig. 91); Zimmerli Art
Museum, Rutgers (fig. 92); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/© RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 93); Private collec-
tion/Peter Willi/Getty Images (fig. 94)
Chapter 4
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (fig.
95); The Philadelphia Museum of Art. A. E. Gallatin
Collection, 1952–61–118 (fig. 96); Private collection/Photo:
Erich Franz (fig. 97); Musée du Louvre, Paris/Photo: Tony
Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig.
98); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat, 1859–1891. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Page 100, fig. 71 (fig. 99); Musée du Louvre, Paris/Photo:
Thierry Le Mage © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
(fig. 100); Musée Picasso, Paris/Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi
© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 101); Musée
d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Michèle Bellot © RMN-Grand
Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 102); © Kunstmuseum Basel
(fig. 103); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat, 1859–1891. New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams,
1991. Page 288, fig. 155 (fig. 104); From: Robert L. Herbert,
Seurat, 1859–1891. New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Pages 269–270, fig. 180 (fig.
105); Imaging Department © President and Fellows of
Harvard College (fig. 106); Image © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, NY (fig. 107); Bibliothèque nationale
de France (fig. 108); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat,
1859–1891. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry
N. Abrams, 1991. Page 54 (fig. 109); Imaging Department
© President and Fellows of Harvard College (fig. 110);
Private collection/Light Blue Studio (fig. 111); Musée
d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Sophie Boegly © RMN-Grand
Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 112); From: Jodi Hauptman,
Georges Seurat: The Drawings. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 2007. Page 76, Plate 35 (fig. 113); Musée d’Or-
say, Paris/Photo: Gérard Blot © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY (fig. 114); © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum,
München (fig. 115); Private collection/© Christie’s Images
Limited 2015 (fig. 116); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles/Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open
Content Program (fig. 117); From: Jodi Hauptman, Georges
Seurat: The Drawings. New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2007. Page 165, Plate 95 (fig. 118); Fondation Beyeler,
Riehen/Basel/Photo: Peter Schibli, Basel (fig. 119); Private
collection (fig. 120); Musée du Louvre, Paris/Photo:
Michèle Bellot © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
(fig. 121); Yale University Art Gallery (fig. 122); From:
John Leighton, Seurat and the Bathers. London: National
 Gallery, 1997. Page 65, fig. 65 (fig. 123); National Galleries
of Scotland/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource,
NY (fig. 124); From: Jodi Hauptman, Georges Seurat: The
Drawings. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
Page 200, Plate 98 (fig. 125); From: Robert L. Herbert,
Seurat, 1859–1891. New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Pages 66–67, Plate 44
(fig. 126); Musée d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Patrice Schmidt
© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 127); Digital
image © The Museum of Modern Art, NY/Licensed by
SCALA/Art Resource, NY (fig. 128); Photography by Erik
Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island
School of Design, Providence (fig. 129); Private collection/
Courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library (fig. 130); Private
collection (fig. 131); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon/Album/
Art Resource, NY (fig. 132); Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. William A. Clark Collection (fig. 133);
© The Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 134); Van Gogh
Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
(fig. 135); From: Robert L. Herbert, Seurat: Drawings and
Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Page
123, fig. 108 (fig. 136)

Postscript
© Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (fig. 137); Musée
d’Orsay, Paris/Photo: Hervé Lewandowski © RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (fig. 138); Collection of
the author (fig. 139); Photo: Héritiers de Mr Kleitz © École
nationale des ponts et chaussées (fig. 140); Collection of
the author (fig. 141)

235 illustration credits