Georges Seurat - Grassy Riverbank 1881
Grassy Riverbank 1881
32x40cm oil/canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection
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From The Dallas Museum of Art:
The first owner of this mysterious small landscape by Georges Seurat was the famed critic, theorist, and dealer Félix Fénéon, who must have admired its equipoise between the landscape aesthetics of the impressionists, with their love of atmosphere, and the more rigorous pictorial construction of the post-impressionists, of whom Cézanne was the most accomplished. Most scholars have dated the painting to 1881-1882, that is, early in the progressive and developmental career of Seurat. Before conceiving of the large-scale canvases that secured his permanent place in the canon of French painting, Seurat made this painting as an independent study of light, reflection, and vegetation in the Parisian suburbs. Daniel Catton Rich, who included this canvas in his landmark Seurat exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, considered it to be the first landscape study painting by Seurat on the island of the Grande Jatte (Rich 1935, 60), where he worked obsessively in the summers of 1884 and 1885. However, no real evidence supports this theory, and the picture is generic enough in its subject that it could have been painted in many parts of the western suburbs of Paris frequented by Seurat.