The long summer of Georges Seurat, Part 2
Part 1 of this post is here.
Shown above is “The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte”, painted in 1887 by Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps he’d had a go himself after hearing the fuss that Seurat had caused. Van Gogh came to Georges’ studio at the end of 1887, and then joined Seurat and Signac in hanging a few canvases at a show at the new Théâtre Libre on rue Blanche. And Vincent made a final visit to Seurat’s atelier on February 19, 1888, on his was to the train station to leave Paris forever. The next day he was in Arles.
Seurat was bound for different vistas as well, summering that year on the Normandy coast — in Le Crotoy, Honfleur and Gravelines — and painting seascapes and harbour scenes. The following February there was another Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels, and then came Madeleine Knobloch.
Seurat kept his 20-year-old working-class mistress a secret from both family and friends, moving with her into a tiny studio flat at #39 on the elegantly named Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux Arts — it’s the angled building in the middle of the image below. This road is now called rue André Antoine, after a clerk at the Paris Gas Company whose interest in the stage led him to become what some call the “Father of Modern Drama”.
Antoine (1858-1943) established the highly innovative Théâtre-Libre in the street in March 1887, before moving shop in the autumn to rue Blanche in Montparnasse, where Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh helped him “decorate”. Interestingly, 39 rue du Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux-Arts was also Modigliani’s address in 1910 and 1911, but then he did move around a lot.
At this domicile on February 16, 1890, Madeleine gave birth to a son, called Pierre-Georges in a mirror image of his father’s name. Later that year Seurat exhibited just one painting, “Young Woman Powdering Herself”, but he didn’t let on that it was a portrait of his lover. See the rest.
