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Georges Seurat
1859-1891
Man with a Beard (Portrait of Camille Pissarro?)
1879
Black chalk with fixative on wove paper, adhered to paper which is stretched on wooden strainer.
12 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches (315 x 240 mm)
Gift of Karen B. Cohen.
2022.350
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Notes:
This delicate portrait was drawn early in Seuratʼs career when he was a pupil of Henri Lehmann at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The young artist became frustrated with the conservative curriculum and would soon develop his distinctive monochromatic drawing style. Here, the twenty-year-old Seurat has likely portrayed the forty-nine-year-old Camille Pissarro, a father figure to French avant-garde artists in the 1870s. Pissarro had also studied under Lehmann and would come to know Seurat better in 1885 when the younger painter began working on his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
Provenance:
Paul Signac (1863-1935), Paris ; by descent to his daughter, Ginette Signac (1913-1980), Paris.
Associated names:
Cohen, Karen B., former owner.
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