Georges Seurat came down to open the door, put a finger to his lips, and led them up three flights of stairs. He closed the door of his attic behind him.
“Georges,” said Gauguin, “I want you to meet Vincent Van Gogh, Theo’s brother. He paints like a Dutchman, but aside from that he’s a damn fine fellow.”
Seurat’s attic was of tremendous size, running almost the full length of the house. There were huge, unfinished canvases on the walls, with scaffolding before them. A high square table had been placed under the gas lamp; lying flat on this table was a wet canvas.
“I’m happy to know you, Monsieur Van Gogh. You’ll pardon me for just a few moments, won’t you? I have another little square of colour to fill in before my paint dries.”
He climbed on top of a high stool and crouched over his canvas. The gas lamp burned with a steady, yellowish flare. About twenty tiny pots of colour formed a neat line across the table. Seurat touched the tip of the smallest painting brush Vincent had ever seen into one of the pots and began putting little points of colour on the canvas with mathematical precision. He worked quietly and without emotion. His manner was aloof and detached, like that of a mechanic. Dot dot dot dot. He held his brush straight up in his hand, barely touched it to the pot of paint, and then dot dot dot dot on the canvas, hundreds upon hundreds of minute dots.
Vincent watched him, agape. At length Seurat turned on his stool.
“There,” he said, “I’ve got that space hollowed out.”
“Would you mind showing it to Vincent, Georges?” asked Gauguin. “Where he comes from they paint cows and sheep. He didn’t know there was a modern art until a week ago.”
“If you’ll sit on this stool, Monsieur Van Gogh.”
Vincent climbed up on the stool and looked at the canvas spread out before him. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, either in art or life. The scene represented the Island of the Grande Jatte. Architectural human beings, made out of infinitely graduated points of colour, stood up like poles in a Gothic cathedral. The grass, the river, the boats, the trees, all were vague and abstract masses of dotted light. The canvas was done in all the brightest shades of the palette, lighter than those Manet or Degas or even Gauguin dared to use. The picture was a withdrawal into a region of almost abstract harmony. If it was alive, it was not with the life of nature. The air was filled with glittering luminosity, but there was not a breath to be found anywhere. It was a still life of vibrant life, from which movement had been forever banished.
Gauguin stood at Vincent’s side and laughed at the expression on his face.
“It’s all right, Vincent, Georges’s canvases strike everyone that way the first time they look at them. Out with it! What do you think?”
Vincent turned apologetically to Seurat.
“You will forgive me, Monsieur, but so many strange things have happened to me in the last few days that I cannot find my balance. I trained myself in the Dutch tradition. I had no idea what the Impressionists stood for. And now I suddenly find everything I believed in discarded.”
“I understand,” said Seurat quietly. “My method is revolutionizing the whole art of painting, so you could not be expected to take it all in with one glance. You see, Monsieur, up to the present, painting has been a matter of personal experience. It is my aim to make it an abstract science. We must learn to pigeonhole our sensations and arrive at a mathematical precision of mind. Every human sensation can be, and must be reduced to an abstract statement of colour, line, and tone. You see these little pots of colour on my table?”
“Yes, I’ve been noticing them.”
“Each of those pots, Monsieur Van Gogh, contains a specific human emotion. With my formula they can be made in the factories and sold in the chemists’ shops. No more haphazard mixing of colours on the palette; that method belongs to a past age. From now on the painter will go to the chemist’s shop and simply pry the lids off his little pots of colour. This is an age of science, and I am going to make a science out of painting. Personality must disappear, and painting must become precise, like architecture. Do you follow me, Monsieur?”
“No,” said Vincent, “I’m afraid I don’t.”
Gauguin nudged Vincent.
“See here, Georges, why do you insist upon calling this your method. Pissarro worked it out before you were born.”
“It’s a lie!”
A flush spread over Seurat’s face. He sprang off his stool, walked quickly to the window, rapped on the sill with the ends of his fingers, then stormed back.
“Who said Pissarro worked it out before me? I tell you it’s my method. I was the first to think of it. Pissarro learned his pointillism from me. I’ve been through the history of art since the Italian primitives, and I tell you, no one thought of it before me. How dare you . . .!”
He bit his lip savagely, walked to one of his scaffolds, and turned a hunched back on Vincent and Gauguin.
