“Seurat, Sea and Style”

Professor Paul Smith

University of Warwick

at Hill Close Gardens, Bread & Meat Close, Warwick CV34 6HF

Wednesday, 8 October 2025, 10.00am

Paul Smith, Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, returns with another of his talks where his own photography adds context. An acknowledged expert on Cezanne, this time his focus is Seurat, subject of the Courtauld’s forthcoming exhibition, Seurat and the Sea, 13 February to 17 May, 2026.

Between 1885 and his early death in 1891, George Seurat spent every summer (but one) painting seascapes along the Normandy coast at Grandcamp, Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin, Le Crotoy, and Gravelines. The Courtauld’s exhibition of Seurat’s seascapes in February 2026 will be the first to be devoted exclusively to these works.

Although eclipsed by his much larger figure paintings, notably the Grande Jatte, several contemporary commentators found Seurat’s marines less rigid or frozen in appearance and more suited to the technique of the ‘dot’. It would nonetheless be a mistake to think that they were straightforwardly naturalistic, even though Seurat did exhort his colleague, Signac, in 1886: ‘Let’s get drunk on light once more!’

Instead, comparisons between the scenes in Seurat’s paintings and their equivalents in reality reveal that his style created a world unto itself. This talk will aim to unravel how Seurat did this through a close analysis of his picture construction, and his use of the media of paint and conté crayon. It will emerge that he made a virtue of necessity out of the limitations that painting and drawing impose on the artist’s ability to represent depth, motion, and light. His world is characterised, in other words, by the shallowness and tension of its space, its tendency towards stillness or stasis, and its subdued light. As Seurat also told Signac in 1886, ‘I see the Seine – an almost indefinably grey sea, even in the strongest sunshine under a blue sky’.

Timing:

10.00 coffee,

10.30 talk and questions,

12.00 close

Parking: Ample parking just outside the venue. 

Price per ticket including coffee and talk £25 for members, £30 non-members

To book a place please click HERE

If you need a lift – please click HERE

Booking closes 6 October