Seurat and the Sea at the Courtauld

Make it stand out

In Les Couleurs invisibles, Jean-Gabriel Causse’s narrator, Antoine Cluzel, embarks the reader in a synaesthetic adventure. During his solitary navigation, he declares: “I delight in rediscovering the length of time. […] I now understand Inuits who daily observe snow and have more than twenty terms to qualify its colour. I too am now capable of discerning tens of whites in my mainsail.” Walking through Seurat and the Sea at the Courtauld Gallery made me wonder how many tens of blues did Georges Seurat (1859-1891) discern in the Channel?

The exhibition focuses on seascapes he created between 1885 and 1890 during his summers in Normandy. Seurat is known as the neo-impressionist inventor of pointillism, for his dots of pure pigments applied to the canvas to form his images. The texture of the painting is so compelling that gallery goers are drawn to its surface. As one approaches, it becomes clear that Seurat’s dots were not all created equal; they range from an actual “point” to an elongated oval. The brushstrokes were part of his experimentation on varying the effects of colour combinations derived from Charles Blanc’s (1813-1882) theories. The beholder’s eye is to combine the colours into tones.

Besides discovering Seurat’s less known seascapes, another draw to the exhibition is the chance to see the paintings alongside their studies. We can consider the black and white drawings on rugged paper and the study of colour on canvas that led to “The Channel at Gravelines” forcing us to praise the equally fascinating talent for composition of the painter. 

Seurat and the Seaends on 17 May 2026. Curated by Dr Karen Serres