Seurat’s regression through these three paintings is surprising given the innovative color theory which Seurat championed throughout his career. Seurat had left the Ecole de Beaux Arts after only a year of formal training to engage in intense personal study of art as a science. Seurat faithfully studied the paintings of classical painter Eugene Delacroix in order to understand color harmony. (Leighton, 45) The last half of the 19th century also saw an outburst of the scientific study of optics and color.
As seen in Seurat’s handwritten notes and letters, Seurat passionately read and took notes on books by aestheticians and scientists such as Charles Blanc (Grammaire des arts du dessin- 1867), David Sutter (Esthetique general- 1865), Michael Eugene Chevreul (De la loi du contraste simultane des coleurs -1839), and Ogden Rood (Modern Chromatics) (Leighton 42 & Broude 16). These authors converted an artist’s intuition of color into scientific principles. Seurat studied these principles in order to create artistic harmony with his colors; by adhering to the scientific principles of color Seurat was convinced he would create striking colors that would aesthetically engage the viewer.
Foremost among these principles of color was the concept of complementary colors, which are color pairs that work together to enhance the brilliance of a color. Color pairs include orange and blue, purple and yellow, green and red. If for example, artists wanted to maximize the intensity of an orange object, they could include hints of blue within and around the orange. In an 1890 letter Seurat tersely explains the tenets which governed his art throughout his lifetime: “Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy between opposites and the analogy between elements similar in tonal value, color, and line.� He goes on to explain that his art consists of contrasts between light and dark, and contrasts between complementary colors “red-green, orange-blue, yellow-violet�. Seurat’s system includes the systematic representation of mood. “Gaiety in terms of tonal value is a luminous dominant tonality of color, a warm dominant color…Calmness in terms of tonal value is an equal amount of dark and light in terms of color, and equal amount of warm and cool… Sadness in terms of tonal value is a dominant dark tonality and in terms of color a cold dominant color.� (qtd Broude 18) Seurat knew that these simplistic rules, if executed correctly, could be extremely powerful tools to command the mood of the viewers of his art. The pointillist method that Seurat developed was based on these tenets, and the color of each tiny dot (point) was determined by an application of these rules. Through this method, Seurat could achieve technical brilliancy.