Study for ‘Poseuses’ 1886 - 1887

Georges Seurat made this drawing with conté crayon as a study for his painting ‘Poseuses’. In late 19th-century France, the nude was a long-established academic subject. Seurat was a modern painter, however, and here he takes the traditional subject and places it in his own studio. Instead of an idealized mythological setting, the woman is surrounded by the tools of art production. By making the space of artistic creation itself visible within the image, Seurat seems to ask questions about the institutions that surround art production. Is he critiquing the commercialization of the nude, which had become such a popular and conventional subject? Is he laying bare the mechanics of the artistic world? To understand Seurat's world, historians pore over exhibition reviews and artists' letters, piecing together a picture of the social dynamics of the art world. Art always exists in a particular time and place, and the historian's job is to uncover these contexts.