Total Loss of the Individual
As industry invaded the workers life, Seurat began to depict the worker in more negative way as a result. In his later works, the worker transforms entirely into the machine. As industry became a more integral part in the life of the worker, the average human worker vanishes entirely, only to be replaced by the machine which is seen in Seurat’s drawings of machines and factories. The individual worker no longer exists, but the worker transformed into the machine. Seurat noticed this great change and his drawings soon took note of this transformation. In drawings such as Steamboat,
the natural progression of industrialization reached its peak, the total nonexistence of the worker, just the machine. In this work, Seurat presents a steamboat at work, but again the absence of people allows Seurat to comment on the ongoing industrialization. By going to the extreme in his portrayal of the worker, leaving out the human worker entirely, all individualization and humanization for the worker is lost. In this drawing, Seurat drew the boat “without consideration for taste, prettiness, or normality” as Helion states in “Seurat as a Predecessor” (Helion 10). Because Seurat disregards “taste” and “prettiness” in this drawing, he is able to characterize these machines as monstrous and ugly. Since this work displays a machine that is part of the industrial revolution, Seurat shows how ugly the industrial revolution became because of the absence of the worker. With the replacement of the worker by the steamboat, Seurat shows his disdain for industry in France because the worker simply becomes “one of the many cogs of the industrial revolution” (Herbert 89).