The Models

Georges Seurat · 1886

The Models - Georges Seurat

Three nude women rest in Seurat's studio, off duty between poses. Behind them hangs part of his famous Grande Jatte. Critics had called his dots cold and lifeless; this huge canvas was his answer.

The story behind the painting

Georges Seurat, born in Paris in 1859, had shown A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1886, the work that launched Neo-Impressionism. Critics complained that his method was cold and could not represent life, and that his figures lacked realism. Models, also called Les Poseuses, was his reply: the same model painted nude in three different poses. Wikipedia dates the work 1886 to 1888, while Wikidata gives 1886, the year he began it. It was exhibited at the fourth Salon des Indépendants in spring 1888, a salon Seurat had helped found with Signac and others, and it was the third of his six major works.

What to look for

This version, held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, is about 200 by 250 cm. It is built from small dots of colour that blend at a distance, a method Seurat preferred to call chromo-luminarism. On the left wall hangs part of La Grande Jatte, which places us clearly in the studio. The three women, the same model in three poses, sit and stand at ease, not posing. Their poses may recall Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and Ingres's Valpinçon Bather. The critic Waldemar Januszczak notes that the hat and clothes of the seated woman at the right of La Grande Jatte may also appear here.

Meaning and intent

The French title means roughly the posers, and the English Models hides some of its point: these women are off duty, not posing. Seurat did not idealise them; by showing the ordinary reality of their work he made them more real. They are not muses but women earning money, and scholars have suggested this complicates the old way women were turned into objects in painting. The size matters too: big canvases were reserved for history painting, small ones for daily life. Seurat blew up a casual studio scene to history scale, upending that hierarchy.

Legacy

Seurat painted two versions of Les Poseuses. The smaller one, closer to his strict divisionist technique and favoured by specialists, passed through Heinz Berggruen and Paul Allen and was sold at Christie's in November 2022. Studies for the painting, from the collection of Seurat's early champion Félix Fénéon, were acquired by France in 1947 and are now in the Musée d'Orsay. Januszczak sees the work as breaking the fourth wall, showing the real woman behind the figures of La Grande Jatte. The large canvas remains at the Barnes Foundation.

Did you know?

Wikipedia · Wikidata

woman · portrait · sitting · nude · nudity · standing · stocking

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