Seurat

I have been interested in Seurat since my schooldays. I cannot recall if my art teacher , Mr Hunter, mentioned his quasi scientific attitude, most probably he did. This interest was greatly helped when the Northumberland Library Service bought two books on the artist which I  requested and wanted to consult. They were Herbert's book on the drawings which was a very attractive book design for its time and Homer's book on Seurat's use of colour. I'm not sure how much of the latter I understood. I have been re-reading Homer and can see why it occupies an important but much criticised place in Seurat studies. It is too dogmatic  but it is also a useful collection of material for anyone interested in colour in C19 art. 

Discussing colour is extraordinarily difficult and optical mixture/fusion is as tricky as they come. One problem is that Homer, and most writers on Seurat do not seem to understand the importance of the size of the dot and the fact that this is crucial to the greying effects said to be observed in The Models and other  late works. We have problems in perceiving the colour of dots: they can only appear to be greyish at the distance where  fusion may be expected to occur. In other words the colour of dots seen at a distance cannot be clearly perceived by the human eye, at increasing distances their true colour cannot be observed and they will tend to look grey. Juxtaposed dots of differing colours will  function in a similar way and it seems to me that there will be a fusion of coloured greys. The importance of dot size has been known for almost 40 years though it is not mentioned in any of the standard works which I have to hand.Webster, in his well known article on Impressionism has nothing to say on this matter.

Homer is obsessed with the ideal viewing distance for paintings and may have derived this preoccupation from Webster. On that score I can only say that we experience paintings as we can. A wall-painting may force a distant viewpoint, a large canvas allows one to move about and to experience it in different ways. It would have been useful if he had avoided sentences like this.

"As a result of the growing  uniformity of Seurat's pointillist technique,  optical mixture could take place much more easily, and thus  his paintings tended increasingly to operate as luminous screens that emit colored light". (page 165)

 

"Seurat and the Science of Painting",William Innes Homer, The M.I.T Press, 1964