Seurat wasn’t just dotty, he was magnificently weird
Painted in 1890, The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening shows Seurat’s calm sea washed in rose and violet light - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
There has never been an exhibition of seascapes by Georges Seurat – which is odd, given that the short-lived French artist’s “marines” make up the bulk of his output. The Courtauld – which excels at jewel-like exhibitions based on enterprising scholarship – therefore deserves praise for mounting one, even if the gallery ever so slightly misses the mark by insufficiently acknowledging their strangeness. Seurat’s chilly Channel views are magnificently weird, and it is in this peculiarity that their poetry may be found.
Today, Seurat is remembered above all as the painter of interminable coloured dots. By the time of his death in 1891, at the age of 31, he had produced only a handful of major canvases, mostly speckled with tiny spots and flecks of pigment applied according to a rigorous, quasi-scientific method. As a result – and as I discovered recently while writing a short book for the National Gallery about Seurat’s first masterpiece, Bathers at Asnières (1884) – he can come across as an automaton. Compared with other modern artists, he is uptight and hard to love.
Painted in 1884, Bathers at Asnières marked Seurat’s breakthrough as a modern painter - Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
I am not sure the Courtauld’s show of 26 works (including attractive oil sketches and preparatory drawings in Conté crayon, alongside 17 canvases) will convince sceptics that Seurat had a heart. His dotty views of ports and the open sea, produced on the northern coast of France over five summers between 1885 and 1890, contain anthropomorphic elements: masts, semaphores, bollards, buoys. But, with one or two matchstick-like exceptions (and in a departure from his monumental Parisian works), Seurat’s seascapes are devoid of people.
The effect is uncanny, as if his subject were a model village. By representing glittering sunshine, fluttering pennants and sailboats bobbing about on enticing turquoise water, these pictures suggest summer holidays. But where are the holidaymakers? The artist’s contemporaries sensed a “penetrating melancholy” in his seascapes, which, for all their luminosity, appear to me to anticipate the eerie landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.
Seurat’s Entrance to the Port of Honfleur (1886) - 2025 Barnes Foundation
Seurat was clever and original. Earlier artists tackling marine themes depicted seething waves; Seurat’s seas are calm as a millpond. His canvases are expertly composed and executed. They seem to contain the seeds of Surrealism, geometric abstraction, Op Art, even Minimalism.
One of the finest is The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening (1890), conceived during Seurat’s final summer and on loan from New York. Set at dusk, it is a meticulous mini-symphony in shades of purple, rose and pink, in which curious, yearning dynamics are established between inanimate objects – including, in the foreground, a lamppost and two prominent anchors that seem to move in concert, like synchronised swimmers.
Seurat rejected the idea that his works contained “poetry”, arguing: “I apply my method and that is it.” But if this wistful and mysterious painting is not what poetry looks like, what is?
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