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Artist or Maker: Georges Seurat (1859-1891)
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Provenance: The artist's studio.
Félix Fénéon, Paris.
Coleman.
Rex de C. Nan Kivell, London.
Frederick Mulder, London.
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Exhibited: London, The Redfern Gallery, Pointillists and their Period, November - December 1950, no. 79 (titled Au concert Européen).
London, The Redfern Gallery, Plaisirs de l'époque 1900, December 1954 - January 1955, no. 7 (titled Au concert Européen).
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Literature: R.L. Herbert, Seurat's Drawings, New York, 1962, no. 129 (illustrated p. 149).
M. F. Zimmermann, Les mondes de Seurat, son oeuvre et le débat artistique de son temps, Paris, 1991, no. 506 (illustrated p. 366).
R.L. Herbert, Seurat Drawings and Paintings, Yale, 2001, no. 101 (illustrated p. 118).
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Notes: Chanteuse de café concert is the only known drawing by Seurat executed on thick Gillot paper. The artist's waxy crayon is applied to the sheet, which he 'then scraped away to reveal the lights, the reverse of Seurat's normal procedure' (R. Herbert, 1962, op. cit.). The singer appears on stage, her corsage illuminated by the powerful lights in the foreground. Her figure conveys the same mysterious aura seen in the contemporary Conté crayon drawings housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art (D.H. 687), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1, D.H. 689) and The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (fig. 2, D.H. 688). Whilst experimenting with a different medium and technique (possibly with intentions of reproduction), Seurat was clearly looking at his works of the same subjects, and quoting specific details from those. In the margin of the present work, he used again the crayon and scalpel for a small study of a woman's head (fig. 3), with the trademark 'cone-shaped' hat worn by the spectators in Au concert Européen (fig. 1).
Whilst Herbert (op. cit.) and Zimmermmann (op. cit.) do not hesitate in their attribution of the present work to Seurat, De Hauke did not include it in his Seurat et son oeuvre (Paris, 1961).
On Seurat's death, his studio was catalogued by Paul Signac, Félix Fénéon, and Maximilien Luce.
The present work is inscribed on the reverse 'L. 378', indicating it was catalogued by Luce. On the basis of the three men's cataloguing, Fénéon then prepared the inventory of the studio, giving the present work no. 378 and describing it as executed on 'papier Gillot'. This inventory is today housed in the Doucet Library in Paris, and has been consulted for the purposes of this catalogue.
In the course of preparing for his 1961 publication (ibid.), De Hauke had access to and annotated Fenéon's inventory, adding his own numbering alongside each of Fénéon's entries. Next to the entry for Fénéon's no. 378, De Hauke added no. '688', which corresponds in his catalogue raisonné to a work now housed in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The Amsterdam work is on Arches paper, unlike the present work and unlike Fénéon's number 378, and it has it been fully laid down on a protective support, however there is no evidence that it carried any numbering upon the reverse.
The present Chanteuse de café concert, therefore, must be the work annotated as '378' in the original inventory by Fénéon.
G. Seurat, Eden concert, 1887-88 (Rijksmuseum van Gogh, Amsterdam) © Rijksmuseum van Gogh
G. Seurat, Au concert européen, 1887-88 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) © MoMA
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