Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Traction in an ordinary register
The title is as plain as the subject: a horse and a cart. It is one of the plainest working arrangements in the subject and one of the least often given a picture to itself. A single animal between shafts, pulling a load, is transport at the domestic end of the scale — no team, no coach, no timetable, no owner commissioning a record of property.
What the record holds
The catalogue gives 1884 as the date of creation and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as the location. No dimensions are recorded for this work. Two style terms are given, Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism, and French is the nationality attached to the painter. Landscape and rural categories accompany Animal Art > Horse, and the measured colour families of the image are yellow and green.
Where a picture like this earns its place
Catalogues of the horse in art fill up quickly with kings, racehorses and cavalry, because those are the pictures that were commissioned and kept. Working subjects survive in smaller numbers and at smaller sizes. An entry like this one is a corrective to the impression the grand pictures leave, which is that the animal was mainly ceremonial.
Sources
2 references- Seurat, Georges — Getty ULAN
French painter and draftsman, 1859-1891
- Georges Seurat — Wikipedia
Georges Pierre Seurat (UK: SUR-ah, -ə, US: suu-RAH; French: [ʒɔʁʒ pjɛʁ sœʁa]; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He devised the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism and used co
