Georges-Pierre Seurat - View of Fort Samson [1885]

Georges-Pierre Seurat - View of Fort Samson [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1885, Seurat went to paint the sea, staying for several weeks at Grandcamp, a Normandy village on the coast of La Manche. Fort Samson was a fifteen-minute walk from Grandcamp. In placing the line of the horizon in this painting a little higher than the middle, Seurat attains a correlation between the earth and the sky that best expresses a feeling of tranquility. The motifs of Seurat's landscapes did not seem fundamentally new in comparison with the old Impressionists. But the differences in both mood and the application of paint, are enormous. While Monet and Renoir painted with brushstrokes which could be large or small, aimed at any direction, existing separately or merging with neighbouring strokes, the methods proposed by Seurat presupposed greater homogeneity and orderliness. His painting immediately begun to be called both divisionist, since it was based on separated brushstrokes, or pointillist, because the strokes were individual dots of paint. Most often, it was called Neo-Impressionist, because of its complex relationship with the art of Monet and Renoir.

[Oil on canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm]