Two exceedingly rare studies for Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Un Dimanche d’été à l’Ile de La Grande Jatte will highlight Christie’s 20th Century livestreamed evening sale in New York on May 11. The two oil panels, being sold from the family of Boston collector Robert Treat Paine II, are among the few examples of Seurat’s extensive preparatory practice for this masterpiece to remain in private hands. More than half of the oil studies for La Grande Jatte are in the collections of prestigious museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, London. Seurats Bathers at Asnières, 1884 has long been one of the most popular paintings in London’s National Gallery.
Both Seurat panels remained in the artist’s possession until his untimely death in 1890, at which point, Paysage et personnages (La jupe rose) was acquired shortly thereafter by a fellow artist, the Belgian painter Jean de Greef. The painting would pass through the collection of the Symbolist poet and art dealer Charles Vignier during the early twentieth century, before crossing the Atlantic in the mid-1920s. Similarly, Le Saint-Cyrien was gifted by the artist’s mother to the painter Henri-Edmond Cross, a close friend of Seurat. It subsequently passed to Félix Fénéon, the influential French art critic who coined the term Neo-Impressionism, before also making its way to the Americas, where it was reunited with Paysage et personnages (La jupe rose) in 1929.
Un Dimanche d’été à l’Ile de La Grande Jatte is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago.
