December 2, 1859

In his brief life Georges Seurat (December 2, 1859 to March 29, 1891) made a unique contribution to modern art; his method, used by the hands of a genius, resulted in works known throughout the world, such as  Un Dimanche Après-midi sur l'Ile de la Grande Jatte In this work "[he] rejected the soft, irregular brushstrokes of impressionism in favor of pointillism, a technique he developed whereby solid forms are constructed by applying small, close-packed dots of unmixed color to a white background."

Sketching was a critical part of his routine. MOMA has four of Seurat's notebooks.This cat is such a sketch, It is my understanding MOMA has it, but it is not yet online.

Seurat's life is also interesting, and here are some excerpts from a biographical sketch I recommend:

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859, the son of comfortably-off parents. His father, a legal official, was a solitary man with a taciturn and withdrawn manner which his son also inherited. At every available opportunity, Antoine-Christophe took leave of his family and disappeared to his villa in the suburbs to grow flowers and say mass in the company of his gardener; he was only at home on Tuesdays. Seurat's mother was quiet and unassuming, but it was she who gave some warmth and continuity to his childhood.....


As a young man Seurat was tall and handsome with a quiet, gentle voice. Reserved and dignified in dress as well as manner, he was always neatly and correctly turned out: one friend described him as looking like a floor-walker in a department store, while the sophisticated and sharp-tongued Edgar Degas nicknamed him "the notary". He was serious and intense ­ preferring to spend his money on books rather than on food or drink ­ but his most pronounced characteristic was his secretiveness....


Seurat's relative financial ease meant that he was unused to dealing with potential clients, and his demands remained modest despite his new fame. Once, when pressed to name his price for the painting he was showing at "The Twenty" exhibition in Brussels, Seurat replied, "I compute my expenses on the basis of one year at seven francs a day". His attitude to his work was similarly down-to-earth and unromantic - he had no pretensions to the status of genius. When some critics tried to describe his work as poetic he contradicted them: "No, I apply my method and that is all". ...


Georges Seurat died in March 1891, totally unexpectedly: he seems to have contracted a form of meningitis. One week he was helping to hang the paintings at the Independents exhibition and worrying about the fact that his hero Puvis de Chavannes had walked past The Circus without so much as a glance; the following week he was dead at just 31 years of age. Signac sadly concluded "our poor friend killed himself by overwork".