Georges Pierre Seurat was born into a prosperous middle-class Parisian family. He was introduced to painting by an uncle on his mother's side, the textile dealer Paul Haumonté-Faivre, himself an amateur painter. In 1875 he started to attend a drawing class at a night school in the city. There he made friends with Edmond Aman-Jean

In 1878 Seurat was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, together with Aman-Jean, he joined a painting class taught by Henri Lehmann, a pupil of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The students of the class studied and copied the old masters in the Louvre.

Scientific theories on color and vision deeply interested Seurat. In 1884, year Seurat entered his first large painting to the Salon but was rejected. However, it was shown in the exhibition held by the Société des Artistes Indépendants. It was there that Seurat became acquainted with Paul Signac, with whom he soon became close friends. Seurat started working on another large canvas in which he created a new style called Pointillism, As usual before beginning the final variant, Seurat made an endless series of preliminary sketches and studies, some of which he exhibited with the Indépendants in December 1884.

Only one art critic, Félix Fénéon, wrote an informed analysis of Seurat’s technique and style:

“If one looks at any uniformly shaded area in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, one can find on every centimeter of it a swirling swarm of small dots which contains all the elements which comprise the color desired. Take that patch of lawn in the shade; most of the dots reflect the local colors of the grass, others, orange-colored and much scarcer, express the barely perceptible influence of the sun; occasional purple dots establish the complementary color of green; a cyanine blue, necessitated by an adjacent patch of lawn in full sunlight, becomes increasingly dense closer to the borderline, but beyond this line gradually loses its intensity… Juxtaposed on the canvas but yet distinct, the colors reunite on the retina: hence we have before us not a mixture of pigment colors but a mixture of variously colored rays of light.”

In 1889 Seurat took part in an exhibition held by “Les Vingt” in Brussels. He was irritated by internal disagreements and started to withdraw from his friends. That year he met and fell in love with Madeleine Knobloch, a young uneducated woman from a working family. Madeleine and Seurat started living together in his studio. They had a son Pierre George,born in 1890.

In 1891 Seurat unexpectedly died of an infectious angina. His son died shortly afterwards of the same infection. Following quarrels Madeleine Knobloch cut off all contact with Seurat’s family and forever disappeared from history.