In the 1880s, Seurat often travelled to the area around Le Raincy, a suburb of Paris located some eight miles east of the city, where he visited his father and other relatives. During these trips he produced drawings of people at work, as well as quiet, unpopulated landscapes. Both subject matters were influenced by the artists of the Barbizon school, who preferred to paint in the open air in the early nineteenth century (see figs. 1 and 2). In the present work, probably depicting a landscape in the area of Le Raincy, a path meanders from the lower edge of the sheet, drawing the viewer’s eye towards the trees on the right, and disappears in the depth of the composition to give way to the softly undulating line that marks the division between the tall trees, executed in stronger, darker strokes of Conté crayon, and the lighter area of the cornfield that becomes the central motif of the composition.
Right: Fig. 2 Georges Seurat, Casseur de pierres, Le Raincy, circa 1879-81, Museum of Modern Art, New York
One of the most innovative and celebrated draughtsmen of the nineteenth century, Georges Seurat created works on paper that are technically dazzling and emotionally compelling. Discussing Seurat’s drawings from the first half of the 1880s, Julia Burckhardt Bild wrote: “In no time at all, Seurat arrived at his mature and characteristic drawing style, distinguished particularly by expressive contrasts or light and shade in hatchings achieved with Conté crayons. Named for their inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755-1805), these drawing pencils were very popular in the nineteenth century.… Seurat obtained a great variety of nuances in the gray tones by varying the pressure on the crayons, which he applied to the paper in the form of a web of irregular fiber-like linear strokes” (Exh. Cat., Kunsthaus Zürich and Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Georges Seurat: Figure in Space, 2009-10, pp. 36-37).
Seurat's talent for evocative draughtsmanship became evident early in his career, as Robert Herbert has observed: “By 1882, Seurat had created his unique style of drawing in which individual lines have disappeared in favour of large shadowy masses. He moulded his velvety forms by delicately rubbing the rough textured paper with a greasy Conté crayon, and by using the end of the crayon to form an even more dense scumble of lines which finally merged into greys and blacks" (Exh. Cat., Art Institute of Chicago, Seurat: Paintings and Drawings,1958). Seurat’s method had been greatly influenced by the aesthetic theories of Charles Blanc and Humbert de Superville who had published studies explaining how the direction of lines, associated with colors, could elicit different emotions in the viewer. According to Blanc, linear directions are “unconditional signs” of emotion. Ascending lines are linked to feelings of joy and life, and, by association, expansion and voluptuousness. Using these theories as a foundation, Seurat developed a technique characterized by subtle tonal variations. Shapes are never defined, contours never drawn, figures are rendered through expressive shadowing of carefully modulated density, described thus by Gustave Kahn in 1929: “Seurat’s originality manifests itself through the simplified silhouettes of the figures and by the varying intensity of dark shadows which appear, as they move further away from the figures, to melt into white and black. One of the characteristics of Seurat’s drawings is that they are composed less for the sake of line than for atmosphere” (Gustave Kahn quoted in The Drawings of Georges Seurat 1859-1891, New York, 1971, p. ix).
The verso of the present work depicts a portrait of Félix Fénéon, also executed in Conté crayon around 1883. Fénéon (1861-1944), who owned the present work at one point, was a Parisian art critic and the editor of La Revue blanche, and one of Seurat’s great early supporters (see fig. 3). It was Fénéon who in 1886 coined the term “Neo-Impressionism,” identifying a group of artists that included Seurat and Paul Signac. Seurat met Fénéon at the Café d’Orient on rue de Clichy, a popular meeting place for artists, writers and critics. Close to the circle of Neo-Impressionist artists, Fénéon's portrait was also painted by Signac (see fig. 4), Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Kees van Dongen. The present work passed through several other storied collections including that of Norton Simon and Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski. For the Krugiers, this work held the special distinction of being the first drawing they acquired when they began collecting in 1971.
