Georges Seurat's Evening, Honfleur And Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night: Differences And Similarities In Style And Subject Matter
The painting styles, if not the subject matter itself (i.e., in both cases an impressionist evening scene) of Georges Seurat's Evening, Honfleur (1886) and Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (June 1889) appear, especially at first, to be extremely dissimilar. Content of the two paintings appears dissimilar as well, with The Starry Night's being an extremely busy and complex looking scene, and Evening, Honfleur's being comparatively calm, straightforward, and placid. This is perhaps because French impressionist painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891) pioneered, within Evening, Honfleur and other paintings, an intricate and highly original colorist technique, called pointillism (consisting of painting with small dots of color, to comprise, to the viewing eye, a combined color, shading or lighting effect, object and/or scene). Van Gogh, for his part, was more bold and deliberate, within The Starry Night, in his own expressionistic uses of color. However, van Gogh was in fact influenced by Seurat (despite Seurat's being the younger of the two painters by six years). Closer examination of Evening Honfleur and Starry Night, side by side, reveals various similarities between the paintings, in addition to their more apparent differences.
According to art critic Robert Hughes in The shock of the new (1980), the radically original, highly impressionistic painting style of Georges Seurat was, in fact:
one of the most lucid classical styles developed since the fifteenth century, and it was based on the dot. The unit of Impressionism had been the brush-
stroke, fat or thin, clean or smeared, streaky, squidgy, or transparent . . .
Seurat wanted something more stable than that. . . . his theory was based on scientific studies of colour analysis and visual perception. (p. 114)
Seurat's technique of pointillism is clearly evident within his painting Evening, Honfleur, one of the greatest of his works. Moreover, Seurat's use of colors (or more accurately, shades, such as tanned grays) within Evening, Honfleur is quite subtle, blended, and muted, with a gray-purple greenish sea and purplish-gray clouds being the...
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