“La Tour Eiffel”
This oil on wood panel painting from 1889 is by the French Post-Impressionist artist, Georges Seurat, and is titled “La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower)”. Seurat painted this the same year that the Eiffel Tower was erected as the grand entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair.
This painting is actually rather small, at just 6 x 9½ inches. Unlike the impressionism artists of his time, Seurat spent a lot of his time preparing sketches of the Parisian tower before finalizing the painting in his studio.
Seurat was deeply interested in varying theories regarding color and how people view the world around them and applied these ideas in his art. He developed the pointillism painting technique, using tiny points of color to depict a scene allowing the image to blend in the viewers mind, rather than blending the paint on the canvas. He used contrasts as a way to depict light, which can clearly be seen in this piece here.
“La Tour Eiffel” is currently on display at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in California.
For more on Georges Seurat, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
