Georges SEURAT (1859-1891) - Lot 22

Georges SEURAT (1859-1891) Milon of Crotone after the sculpture by Pierre Puget, ca. 1877-1879 Conté black pencil on Michallet laid paper (filligranné lower right), two sheets planout at top. 62 x 46 cm Provenance : - Seurat family, bequeathed by the artist to his sister Marie-Berthe Seurat (1847-1921), wife of Léon-Antonin Appert; - Léopold Appert (1867-1931), nephew of the artist; - Private collection in Paris, then by descent to the present owner. Bibliography: - César M. de Hauke, Seurat et son œuvre, Paris, 1961, tome II, pp. 24-25, no. 286, reproduced and described as Prométhée. - Robert L. Herbert, Seurat's Drawings, New York, 1962, fig. 46, p. 46, reproduced and described as Milon of Crotone after Pierre Puget. - Albin Madeleine-Pedrillat, Seurat, Skira, Geneva, 1990, p.20, reproduced and described as "Copy after Puget's Milon de Crotone". Related work: Pierre Puget, Milon de Crotone, 1671-1682, commissioned by Colbert for the Château de Versailles, Sculpture Department, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. M.R. 2075. Georges Seurat (1859-1891) began drawing at the age of 7 in 1856. Copying from the antique was a de rigueur exercise in any drawing school. At the age of fifteen, Georges Seurat attended the municipal art school near his family home, where he met Edmond Aman-Jean (1858-1936). Then, in February 1878, at the age of 18, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the temple of academicism, in the painting section, where he was a pupil of Henri Lehmann. A great admirer of Ingres, he was a man of 64, firmly entrenched in his certainties, rigid and closed to new ideas. Unlike his Seurat liked him and followed his teaching assiduously. Seurat worked from Antiquity, producing a large charcoal drawing of an antique sculpture depicting a Satyr and a goat around 1877-1879, interpreted Ingres' Roger délivrant and Angélique, and copied Holbein's Portrait of Southwell. The young Seurat made more drawings after Ingres than after any artistic source. In particular, he studied the detail of Nicolas Poussin's hand (Metropolitan Museum of Art, no. 1987.326) in Ingres' Apotheosis of Homer in the Louvre. Ingres himself was inspired by Poussin's Self-Portrait, also in the Louvre. Focusing on the hand of the founder of 17th-century French classicism, Seurat inscribed the drawing: "Voilà le génie" ("Here comes the genius"). Following in the footsteps of Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo and Poussin, Seurat regularly visited the church of Saint-Sulpice to contemplate and copy Delacroix's The Struggle of Jacob with the Angel. According to Signac, it was from Delacroix that he learned rhythm, measure and contrast. Impressionist apprenticeship Before inventing a new way of painting, Impressionist artists were trained according to the rules of academic education. In the 19th century, learning to paint meant first and foremost copying, and in particular copying from the antique: students copied Greek and Roman statues in art schools and museums, notably the Louvre. The aim was to understand the ideal proportions, balance and beauty of the human body according to classical canons. For example, Edgar Degas, before becoming one of the masters of modernism, spent a long time copying ancient sculptures such as the Borghese Gladiator. These studies enabled him to master the movement and tension of the body, which he later reinterpreted in his famous depictions of dancers. But the Impressionists didn't stop at slavish copying. They transformed this practice into a tool for personal research. For them, copying no longer meant repeating an old model, but exploring visual perception and the changing effects of light. Thus, copying from Antiquity, the starting point of a solid training, became for the Impressionists the springboard for an artistic revolution. From the imitation of the past, they gave birth to a painting oriented towards modernity. The Conté pencil technique on Michallet paper In the late 1870s, Georges Seurat began experimenting with black-and-white drawing. This practice enabled him to implement his theory of contrast, notably by exploring the effects of chiaroscuro. He used Conté pencils exclusively on rough laid paper, giving particular preference to Michallet paper. Thanks to the many possibilities offered by these two materials, Seurat was able to make his research into light visible. Studying the characteristics of his tools helps us to better understand his works: by associating