A hot haze softens the edges of the trees in the middle-distance and washes out colour from the bridges and factories in the background—the blue of the sky at the horizon is paled almost to whiteness. It was in the late nineteenth century a break with practice to use painting on this scale in this way, but Bathers at Asnières carries this unusual message with no note of incivility or incongruity.[9]. The canvas is of a suburban, placid Parisian riverside scene. The population of Paris had doubled from one million in 1850 to two million in 1877, and the population of Asnières had almost doubled in just ten years to reach 14,778 in 1886. In 1884, Georges Seurat was only twenty-four years old when he completed this picture. We now understand that the location of this painting was between the Asnières and Courbevoie bridges, in the North West of Paris. Industrialisation was the major influence upon this, but there was also a widening of opportunity for some, as well as a greater inclination for artists to look at all levels of society within their work. The canvas is of a suburban, placid Parisian riverside scene. Georges Seurat was a French painter who devoted his life to the understanding of painting methods based on scientific theories. The last of these studies—presently housed at the Art Institute of Chicago—was painted in 1883 and is very close to the final work, except most obviously in respect of its size; it is just 25 cm long and 16 cm high. Distinctively coloured forms in close proximity, such as the grouping of horse-chestnut colours of the clothes on the bank, and the grouping of oranges of the boys in the water, add to the stability of the work—an effect reinforced in the cluster of shadows to the left on the bank, and the un-verisimilar play of light around the bathing figures. [10], César de Hauke’s catalogue raisonné of the works of Seurat lists fourteen works as oil studies for the Bathers, most if not all of which were almost certainly painted outdoors, and in which the composition of the final piece may be seen gradually taking shape. Pissarro, Neo-impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde. [35][36] But with the passage of decades, the Bathers slowly emerged into critical respectability. [23] In 1886 Paul Durand-Ruel took the picture, along with some three hundred other canvases, to the National Academy of Design in New York, where he held his exhibition of the “Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris.”[24], The painting received mixed reviews from critics and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. Georges Seurat made this painting as a preparatory work for his monumental Bathers at Asnières, now in the National Gallery, London.It shows men and boys on the bank of the Seine River in the working-class Parisian suburb of Asnières. The foreground—for example—consists of a balayé network of strokes atop a more solid layer of underpaint, suggesting the flickering play of sunlight over the blades of grass. Near the beginning of this book, Blanc had claimed that Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses was an exemplary case of how art should idealise nature, concluding his passage, ‘This is how a scene from everyday life suddenly becomes raised to the dignity of a history painting.’ This remark seems pertinent to the Bathers, which certainly shares a number of compositional elements with Poussin’s masterpiece of 1638. London, c.1946. Pointillism: Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It is likely that boats could also have been taken in and out of the water in this spot, which may well have widened this opening in the bank over time. From The National Gallery, London, Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884), Oil on canvas, 201 × 300 cm Receiving his earliest art lesson from his uncle, he didn’t have a formal art lesson till 1875. Georges Seurat 005.jpg. Seurat. Seurat. Like the other artists exhibiting, Seurat’s work is refused by the official Salon. There are also a number of completed artworks intended for display, such as Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe and also The Seine seen from La Grande Jatte. This institution held its first exhibition—the Salon de Artistes Indépendants—between May 15th and July 1st, 1884 at a temporary building in the place du Carrousel, adjacent to the Louvre. Horizontal and vertical lines at the middle and far distance contrast with arched backs and the relaxed postures of the figures toward the front. Their faces are for the most part shown in profile, and not one of them faces in the direction of the viewer. In 1882 Seurat rented a small studio in the rue Chabrol close to his family’s home. He was just 24 at the time and sought to produce a large painting that would get him noticed within the Salon. The slope forming most of the left hand side of the painting was known as the Côte des Ajoux, near the end of the rue des Ajoux, on the north bank of the river. The industrial infrastructure of bridges and factories to the rear is a notable feature of the composition. A River Bank (The Seine at Asnières) A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte Angler Bathers at Asnières Bridge at Courbevoie Circus Sideshow. This depiction of Bathers would actually come first of the two major artworks, with A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte then being started straight soon after. The location depicted in the portrait was just from the center of Paris only short of four miles. Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884, oil on canvas, 6.6 x 9.8 ft (National Gallery, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. Bathers at Asnieres is one of the large-scale compositions by Georges Seurat. By means of these ochres and browns the picture was deadened and appeared less brilliant than the works the impressionists painted with a palette limited to prismatic colours. Seurat, Une Baignade, Asnières (The Gallery Books, No. Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884, oil on canvas, 6.6 x 9.8 ft (National Gallery, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. The success of the two paintings has led to a good amount of research being completed on them in the years that have passed since. Google Classroom … The huge work found in front of us here focuses on the working-class residents of the city. There may not have been the same romance in approach, but the completed paintings were just as impactful, if not more than much of what the Impressionists delivered themselves. Paris, 1959. [7] The balayé technique is not rolled out in a consistent manner across the painting, but is adapted where Seurat thought it appropriate. As mentioned elsewhere, Seurat was someone who bore some similarities with the Impressionists of this period, but who also had many unique characteristics to his work. The critic and friend of Seurat, Félix Fénéon waited many years before commenting, ‘Though I did not commit myself in writing, I then [in 1884] completely realised the importance of this painting.‘[37][38] For many years, Bathers at Asnières remained in the possession of Seurat’s family, and in 1900 the work was purchased by Felix Fénéon. In both of these paintings the figures are shown in side profile, meaning we can only see one side of them. Bathers at Asnières (French: Une Baignade, Asnières) is an 1884 oil on canvas painting by the French artist Georges Pierre Seurat, the first of his two masterpieces on the monumental scale. It is indeed a railway bridge that we can spot in the far distance, which would have run alongside a road bridge during that time. Puvis de Chavannes. Pages 61, 62. As well as the Bathers, some of Seurat’s better known works to come from the vicinity include his The Seine at Courbevoie, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and The Bridge at Courbevoie. But it is painted with so much conviction that it appears almost touching and I don’t quite dare poke fun at it.’[26][27][28][29] In L’Intransigeant, Edmond Bazire, writing under the pseudonym ‘Edmond Jacques’, wrote, ‘behind and under some prismatic eccentricities Seurat conceals the most distinguished qualities of draughtsmanship, and envelops his bathing men, his ripples, his horizons in warm tones.’[30][31] Both Jules Claretie and Roger Marx also described the painting as being a noteworthy ‘Impressionist’ painting. While the bathers at Asnieres on the left bank are working-class people, it is the bourgeoisie who are on the right bank. It remains amongst the highlights to be found in this venue, even though their overall selection of works is extensive and takes in many of the world's most important artists. Perhaps we can therefore see a comparison between their working lives in the smoke of industry, against the free and fun leisure time being spent undressed by the side of this beautiful river. Brian Petrie. Whilst Seurat's work would receive fairly polarised reactions at first, it was clear that these new ideas were here to stay, and that it was just a matter of time before academics grew to accept that. The curvature of slumping back and bent legs is clearly matched in both figures, and indeed the posture also appears in the Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea of Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, a painting with which any student at the École would have been familiar. They line this picturesque spot in the city, looking out across the river whilst enjoying some rare and hard-earned leisure time. Thames and Hudson. Bathers At Asnierès. Whereas for the most part Seurat used these oil studies to work through his compositional problems, nine extant drawings in conté crayon show him focusing individually on each of the five main figures in the painting. The reality of the often unpleasant or dangerous conditions in which industrial workers laboured had already been fully taken on by painters, such as in—for instance—Monet’s painting of 1875, Men unloading coal, which in fact shows the bridges at Asnières as they were almost a decade before Seurat painted them. 1996. Following the rejection of the Bathers by the jury of the Salon of 1884, Seurat joined forces with some like-minded artists to become a founder members of the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. Asnières-sur-Seine; Bathers at Asnières; Collection of the National Gallery, London; Georges Seurat; National Gallery; Pointillism; Société des Artistes Indépendants; User:Jane023/Paintings in … His decision to make the grassy bank the main focus, with bridges and buildings very much in a supporting role, gives us a much more positive insight into the lives of these people and avoids labelling them as victims or the downtrodden as many other artists would previously have done. It seems possible that Seurat completed his first small oil study in this preparatory phase for the painting of the Bathers as early as 1882. [32][33] The Art Amateur’s anonymous reviewer of the New York exhibition—who even explicitly likened Bathers at Asnières to Italian fresco painting—, also called the picture a modern ‘Impressionist’ work. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. There was, therefore, a working element to this side, though on this occasion, the figures in front of us are there purely for their own enjoyment. Further down the bank we see some other people enjoying the sunshine, with some boats in the background, plus a cityscape behind that. H. Floury, Libraire-Editeur, 1, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, 1921. Jo Kirby and Ashok Roy, National Gallery Company Limited, 2003. The Bathers continued to puzzle many of Seurat’s contemporaries, and the picture was not widely acclaimed until many years after the death of the artist at the age of just thirty-one. Bain a la Grenoullere by Claude Monet They are almost entirely motionless, giving an alternative impression of how people from this level of society would behave. They help us to understand his thought processes prior to commencing the final piece, and the intricate way in which he worked meant he had to be pretty sure about most of the painting before he started putting oils down. This was Seurat’s first painting exhibited at newly created Society of Independent Artists. Perhaps it appealed to the middle class art critics to see those beneath them struggling, but Seurat saw a beauty and honesty in their lives, to the point where their level of happiness, with lower expectations, may actually have been higher than in comparison to the middle classes found on the other side of the bank in his follow up painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The sculpted contours of Piero’s soldier’s cape find an echo in the rugged contours of the trousers in Seurat’s painting, and the flick at the back of the guard’s hat becomes a rhythmic motif showing up with hats, hair and bootstraps alike in Bathers. Perhaps his decision to avoid mixing paint and instead to focus on delivering colours via the eye's handling of neighbouring tones was an attempt to take an even firmer control on his work. On the right-hand foreground of the canvas are two young bathers in the water and one on the grassy riverbank. Seurat signed the painting in the lower left corner and had immediately started a conversation within French art circles about how the lower classes had previously been depicted within art and whether or not it was in fact accurate. Seurat and The Bathers. This technique was influenced by colour theories that he had been studying in recent years and they also allowed a bright palette to be used within his work. In terms of their own social standing, we can see their consistent fashion of bowler hats, boots and vests which places them somewhere around the working and lower middle class levels of French society at that time. Seurat would have studied many different spots along the river in order to get just the right look for his work, and in other places there would have been an abudance of small businesses to serve the needs of these local workers. John Rewald. He knew that size would need to be met with technical brilliance and so he set about the idea of using small dots of carefully planned colour in order to achieve a stunning luminosity. This chunky, cross-hatched brushstroke pattern is in contrast with the nearly horizontal, much thinner strokes that are used to depict the water, and is in even greater contrast with the smoothly rendered skin of the figures.[8]. Locations such as this one were sometimes shown on French nineteenth century maps as Baignade (or, ‘bathing area’).[2][3]. But one professor from that institution was to have a more particular and wide ranging impact on Seurat’s imagination, which bore directly discernable effects in the Bathers. The Bathers at Asnieres is by a French impressionist artist called Georges Seurat. Both paintings are on the monumental scale—that of Puvis’ being over four metres long—and both works have life-size figures. [1], The spot depicted is just short of four miles from the centre of Paris. Isolated figures, with their clothes piled sculpturally on the riverbank, together with trees, austere boundary walls and buildings, and the River Seine are presented in a formal layout. When he submitted it to the Salonof 1884 it is I think it was at the famous Eight Exhibition of Paintings in the rue Laffitte that I first saw and became acquainted with Seurat and the painters he influenced...". There is also a number of trees which cover both sides of the river, though Seurat deliberately selects open areas in which to capture these portraits. Both works show to the right a lowered male figure, and to the left a reclining male figure painted from behind. [40], X-ray imaging of the Bathers has revealed that some components of the composition were altered as Seurat’s work on the canvas progressed, while other components were probably not in the painting at all, as he first painted it. 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