Portrait of Georges Seurat

This portrait of Georges Seurat by his close friend and fellow painter Ernest Laurent was made in 1883, the year before Seurat submitted his monumental Bathers at Asnières to the Salon — the painting that announced the arrival of a radically new pictorial intelligence in French art. Seurat was twenty-four when this portrait was made, still relatively unknown outside his immediate circle of École des Beaux-Arts friends, and the image captures him at the threshold of the most intensely creative period of his short life. Ernest Laurent (1859–1929) had been a fellow student with Seurat at the studio of Henri Lehmann, where both absorbed the rigorous academic training that Seurat would later systematically subvert through his development of Chromoluminarism, or Pointillism. Laurent went on to a successful academic career, becoming a portraitist of considerable distinction, and his friendship with Seurat — preserved in letters — gives this image an intimacy and authenticity that more formal likenesses lack. Seurat died in 1891 at only thirty-one, and portraits of him are rare; this painting is consequently one of the primary visual records of his appearance in his working years. The work was made before the full development of Pointillism, showing Seurat in a looser, more conventional manner consistent with their shared academic training.

Laurent paints in a competent academic realist manner here — smooth tonal modeling, careful attention to the structure of the face, and warm flesh tones built through layered glazes. The execution is less experimental than Seurat's own contemporary work, reflecting Laurent's more conventional trajectory. Nevertheless the portrait has genuine psychological sensitivity: this is a likeness by someone who knew the subject well, and it shows in the attentive specificity of the face.