A Summer Landscape 1883

Georges Seurat made this oil on panel painting, A Summer Landscape, sometime in the 1880s in France. It shows a lone figure strolling through a meadow, a copse of trees to the left, houses in the distance, all under a cloudy sky. Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter who, dissatisfied with the movement’s spontaneity, sought to bring a more scientific, rigorous approach to painting. He studied color theory and optics to develop a painting technique called “pointillism”, involving applying small, distinct dots of color to the canvas. Although this painting is not pointillist, Seurat had a concern with visual perception. His work was a bridge between Impressionism and early Modernism. Historians can use letters, scientific publications, and critical reviews to understand the cultural background in which Seurat made his art. Through considering the social conditions of artistic production, we can more fully understand this artwork's meaning and significance.