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拍品专文
Drawn circa 1881, Femme s’eloignant belongs to a formative moment in Georges Seurat’s career when the artist was developing an interest in depicting character types from French society.
The drawing occupies a transitional position between Seurat’s earliest small-scale works—constructed through careful juxtapositions of parallel lines—and his later compositions, where he achieved nuanced gradations of light and shadow through increasingly sophisticated handling of his pigments. Conté crayon was Seurat’s preferred medium when working on paper as it allowed him to create areas of dense velvety black and simultaneously emphasize the paper’s surface.
The figure’s upright, vertical silhouette is reinforced by a network of straight lines that grow denser and more jagged toward the ground. The untouched margins of the sheet, combined with a faint halo of shadow, create a subtle, shimmering atmosphere. Through the addition of hatched passages in the upper right and lively zigzag strokes in the foreground, Seurat injects movement into what might otherwise appear a static composition.
This drawing marks a moment when Seurat was turning to independent works on paper, including a series of elegant women completed between 1882 and 1884, such as La Dame en noir (Hauke, no. 508), Femme s'éloignant has the same highly stylized posture, inspired by the poise and restraint of Greek sculptures.
Critics and art historians have historically differed in their classification of the drawing. In the first major illustrated 1982 publication devoted exclusively to Seurat’s drawings, Gustave Kahn juxtaposed Femme s'éloignant with La Nourrice, circa 1880-1881 (Hauke, no. 391) a pure line drawing, and Buste, circa 1884 (Hauke, no. 615), an ink and pen study for the La Grande Jatte. By contrast, in 1935 Daniel Catton Rich associated it with more finished works linked to the evolution of La Grande Jatte.
The drawing’s first owner was Seurat’s friend and fellow artist Paul Signac; together with Félix Fénéon and Maximilien Luce, he helped inventory the artist’s studio on 3 May 1891. As a gesture of thanks, Seurat’s family gifted a portion of the studio’s contents, particularly drawings to the three artists. The work remained in Signac’s personal collection after the separation from his wife Berthe, and was then acquired by Lucie Druet, the wife of the photographer and art dealer Eugène Druet who ran his eponymous gallery until 1938. Subsequently it was owned by Jacques Rodrigues-Henriqués, an art dealer and the son-in-law of Félix Vallotton.
The drawing occupies a transitional position between Seurat’s earliest small-scale works—constructed through careful juxtapositions of parallel lines—and his later compositions, where he achieved nuanced gradations of light and shadow through increasingly sophisticated handling of his pigments. Conté crayon was Seurat’s preferred medium when working on paper as it allowed him to create areas of dense velvety black and simultaneously emphasize the paper’s surface.
The figure’s upright, vertical silhouette is reinforced by a network of straight lines that grow denser and more jagged toward the ground. The untouched margins of the sheet, combined with a faint halo of shadow, create a subtle, shimmering atmosphere. Through the addition of hatched passages in the upper right and lively zigzag strokes in the foreground, Seurat injects movement into what might otherwise appear a static composition.
This drawing marks a moment when Seurat was turning to independent works on paper, including a series of elegant women completed between 1882 and 1884, such as La Dame en noir (Hauke, no. 508), Femme s'éloignant has the same highly stylized posture, inspired by the poise and restraint of Greek sculptures.
Critics and art historians have historically differed in their classification of the drawing. In the first major illustrated 1982 publication devoted exclusively to Seurat’s drawings, Gustave Kahn juxtaposed Femme s'éloignant with La Nourrice, circa 1880-1881 (Hauke, no. 391) a pure line drawing, and Buste, circa 1884 (Hauke, no. 615), an ink and pen study for the La Grande Jatte. By contrast, in 1935 Daniel Catton Rich associated it with more finished works linked to the evolution of La Grande Jatte.
The drawing’s first owner was Seurat’s friend and fellow artist Paul Signac; together with Félix Fénéon and Maximilien Luce, he helped inventory the artist’s studio on 3 May 1891. As a gesture of thanks, Seurat’s family gifted a portion of the studio’s contents, particularly drawings to the three artists. The work remained in Signac’s personal collection after the separation from his wife Berthe, and was then acquired by Lucie Druet, the wife of the photographer and art dealer Eugène Druet who ran his eponymous gallery until 1938. Subsequently it was owned by Jacques Rodrigues-Henriqués, an art dealer and the son-in-law of Félix Vallotton.