This haunting work belongs to a remarkable body of landscapes that Seurat drew in the early 1880s. A lone figure moves along a path through a park setting with hilly terrain, tended lawns, and tall trees. Seurat applied Conté crayon with varying pressure to the textured paper, creating luminous middle tones counterpoised with solid blacks. With its mysterious, twilit atmosphere, Landscape demonstrates the artist’s unique tenebrist style—characterized by contrasting shadows and dramatic illumination—which he would develop throughout the decade.
Georges Seurat
French, 1859–1891
Landscape, ca. 1881
Black Conté crayon
The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray; 2019.866
Gray Collection Trust, Art Institute of Chicago
Photography by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics Inc.
Rachel Federman: At first glance, the shadowy forms of this landscape seem to emerge from the sheet itself. In fact, they are comprised of countless lines of Conte crayon. Georges Seurat, who is best known as the progenitor of pointillism in which a painting is created from innumerable dots of vivid color, created hundreds of drawings in his short career. They range from early academic nudes, like one seen elsewhere in the exhibition to dark atmospheric drawings like this one. He began these mature drawings on textured paper in 1881 when he was only 22 years old. In this scene of a solitary figure traversing a country path, Seurat placed a familiar subject at the very edge of legibility, teetering on the brink of abstraction. As in his pointillist paintings, he underscored the artifice and mystery of two-dimensional representation. A hundred years after Seurat was born and unencumbered by any fealty to the natural world, the abstract expressionist artist Franz Kline commemorated a trip to Chicago with a drawing nearby, also a study in light and dark. Kline created masses of varying tones by applying individual brushstrokes in different directions. Like Seurat, he enlisted the white of the paper itself as an active element in the composition.