No understanding of Georges Seurat’s development would be complete without consideration of the 85 oil studies he produced in the formative years prior to his first large painting, Bathers (1883–84). Agrarian workers and peasants are among the most consistent subjects of these early works, which reflect the important influence of Jean-François Millet, the Barbizon school painter of rural life. Farm Women at Work and Peasant with Hoe recall Millet’s familiar iconographical theme of gleaners in the fields, while Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass echoes on a small scale Millet’s sense of monumentality.

Unlike Millet, who ventured deep into the countryside, Seurat found his subjects in the suburbs of Paris, which in the 1880s were zones marked by the clash of industrialization and displaced rural life. We may speculate that there is a subtle meaning in these depictions of suburban peasants who have lost their identity to modernization; yet there is also an undeniable reverie in Farm Women at Work and Peasant with Hoe. Both studies are characterized by the penetrating quality of a moment frozen in time in which the bounty of the harvest, the dignity of labor, and close communion with nature are unified. Seurat achieved his synthesis through innovative coloristic and painterly techniques. Working directly in the field, he followed the Impressionists’ practice of painting outdoors to capture the fugitive effects of light; he also studied contemporaneous developments in physics, optics, and color theory assiduously. In accordance with scientific thinking, he applied pure hues rather than premixed pigments to the canvas and employed the technique of “optical mixing,” in which complementary colors “vibrate” when placed in correspondence with one another. At this time, Seurat made his painting surface highly active through the use of short, crosshatched brushstrokes; he subsequently distilled these brushstrokes into tiny dots, a method now known as Pointillism.

Jan Avgikos