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 Théo van Rysselberghe, |
Recent Acquisition
about 1892 The leader of an experimental exhibition society called 'Les Vingt', he was in search of avant-garde art to show back home the following year. In Paris, Van Rysselberghe was startled by Georges Seurat's monumental, recently completed 'Sunday Afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte' (Art Institute of Chicago) and persuaded the painter to exhibit it in Brussels. After initial personal resistance, Van Rysselberghe himself fell under the spell of the young French artist's pointillist painting technique, where the picture is composed of countless tiny dots of complementary colours. By 1888 he had begun to experiment with the technique, then adopted it wholeheartedly, and was quickly recognised as the leader of the Belgian pointillists, the most important group outside France to take up and expand upon Seurat's innovations. In the early 1890s, Van Rysselberghe executed a series of deceptively simple, light-filled and densely worked pointillist seascapes, some of which were painted on the French Riviera where, beginning in 1892, he and Signac travelled and worked together. This previously unrecorded painting may date from one such campaign. Indeed, it and contemporary works by Signac should be seen as elements of an on-going artistic dialogue between the two men as, together, they attempted to expand the expressive possibilities of the pointillist technique, and to forge from it a mode of personal expression. Van Rysselberghe's touch is distinctive. White dots sprinkled across the pictorial surface, and dots that form decorative swirling patterns in the sky, give the painting an animated, almost dancing quality, different from the austerity of Seurat's late seascapes. Its remarkable state of preservation, both unlined and unvarnished, is particularly notable. In later years, Van Rysselberghe's pointillist dot became larger and more square, and was applied less densely across the surface. The artist gave up the style in 1904. |
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