DreamingofFrance

Paris, Galerie Braun et Cie. Le Néo-Impressionnisme , February–March 1932 . no. 11 (as Paysage , lent by Fénéon); Paris, Galerie Hervé. Quelques tableaux des maîtres néo-impressionnistes . May–June 1967 . no. 14 (as Paysage à la Grande Jatte ); Kochi, The Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Georges Seurat et le Néo- Impressionnisme 1885 – 1905 . no. 32 (as Le pré en contrebas ). Born in Paris in 1846 , Dubois-Pillet was a self-taught artist and central figure in the Parisian avant garde, when as a founding member of Société des Artistes Indépendants, he befriended another young painter named Georges Seurat. In May 1886 , Georges Seurat exhibited the groundbreaking A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition. Depicting a popular and fashionable weekend spot on the Seine outside of Paris that had also been painted by Monet, Sisley and Van Gogh, Seurat’s work employed the new technique of Pointillism, with small dots of pure color scientifically positioned so as to blend in the viewer’s eye. Our Pointillist Landscape of La Grande Jatte , was painted at exactly the same moment. Its first owner was the renowned scholar and critic Felix Fénéon, who was recently the subject of an exhibition at MoMA titled Felix Fénéon—The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond . It was Fénéon who gave Pointillism its name, first using the expression peinture au point (“painting by dots”), although Seurat actually preferred the label “Divisionism,” or for that matter, “Chromoluminarism.” But it was Pointillism that stuck. Luminous and intricately colored, this small work shows us the important aesthetic and stylistic transition taking place in French art in the late 1890 s. Works by Dubois-Pillet are rare; the artist only lived to the age of 44 , and many works in the estate were destroyed the following year in a studio fire.