Seurat and the Sea | The Courtauld Gallery
The friend I saw this exhibition with said it’d have been better titled Five Summers. Given that Georges Seurat had just five summer painting expeditions to coastal towns before he died - the cause is unknown - aged 31 in 1891. Poignantly, his seascapes represent five years of work for a young man; an artist who produced only a few dozen canvases in his working life, around a third of which are currently on show at the Courtauld.
For each of these years, Seurat took the train north from Paris, to Normandy, and painted seaside towns lit by serene, pearlescent light. The serenity comes from hard artistic labour: looked at closely, his canvases seethe with tiny lines and pointillist dots. The image coalesces and calms from a distance. I liked it best of all when Seurat eschewed picturesque seaside detail and concentrated instead on primeval forms: hill, sea, sky: almost abstract, almost a Pollock, a Rothko.
The Channel at Gravelines, Evening (summer 1890)
In this way, he reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud, who showed in these galleries a few months ago. But where Thiebaud’s lusciously-painted cakes from the 1960s sometimes seem to reference - and slyly mock - his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Seurat’s blank seascapes anticipate these purer forms. He was avant garde.
It’s entirely appropriate that the painting pictured above is in MoMA’s collection, then. It’s from the final summer, when Seurat travelled to Gravelines, so far north it was almost Belgium. The water is still. The calm sea blends into the reddening sky. And, in the foreground, a lamppost and two stricken anchors are in silhouette, shadowed like an approaching Reaper. It’s painfully poignant, given we know what’s coming.
Just five summers of sea and sky. Nothing more.
Seurat and the Sea is at The Courtauld Gallery (London). 13 February - 17 May 2026