Vincent was utterly amazed at the transition. The man leaning over his canvas on the table had had architectural features, perfect and cold. He had had dispassionate eyes, the impersonal manner of a scientist in a laboratory. His voice had been cool, almost pedagogic. The same veil of abstraction had been over his eyes that he threw over his paintings. But the man at the end of the attic was biting the thick, red under lip that stuck out from the full beard, and was angrily rumpling the mass of curly brown hair that had been so neat before.
“Oh, come, Georges,” said Gauguin, winking at Vincent. “Everyone knows that it’s your method. Without you there would have been no pointillism.”
Mollified, Seurat came back to the table. The glow of anger died slowly out of his eyes.
“Monsieur Seurat,” said Vincent, “how can we make painting an impersonal science when it is essentially the expression of the individual that counts?”
“Look! I will show you.”
Seurat grabbed a box of crayons from the table and crouched down on the bare plank floor. The gaslight burned dimly above them. The night was completely still. Vincent knelt on one side of him, and Gauguin squatted on the other. Seurat was still excited, and spoke with animation.
“In my opinion,” he said, “all effects in painting can be reduced to formulae. Suppose I want to draw a circus scene. here’s a bareback rider, here the trainer, here the gallery and spectators. I want to suggest gaiety. What are the three elements of painting? Line, tone and colour. Very well, to suggest gaiety, I bring all my lines above the horizontal, so. I make my luminous colours dominant, so, and my warm tone dominant, so. There! Doesn’t that suggest the abstraction of gaiety?’
“Well,” replied Vincent, “it may suggest the abstraction of gaiety, but it doesn’t catch gaiety itself.”
Seurat looked up from his crouching position. His face was in the shadow. Vincent observed what a beautiful man he was.
“I’m not after gaiety itself. I’m after the essence of gaiety. Are you acquainted with Plato, my friend?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, what painters must learn to portray is not a thing, but the essence of a thing. When the artist paints a horse, it should not be one particular horse that you can recognize in the street. The camera can take photographs; we must go beyond that. What we must capture when we paint a horse, Monsieur Van Gogh, is Plato’s
“I follow,” said Vincent, “but I don’t agree.”
“We’ll come to the agreement later.”
Seurat got off his haunches, slipped out of his smock, and wiped the circus picture off the floor with it.
“Now we go on to calmness,” he continued. “I am doing a scene on the Island of the Grande Jatte. I make all my lines horizontal, so. For tone I use perfect equality between warm and cold, so; for colour, equality between dark and light, so. Do you see it?”
“Go on, Georges,” said Gauguin, “and don’t ask foolish questions.”
“Now we come to sadness. We make all our lines run in a descending direction, like this. We make the cold tones dominant, so; and the dark colours dominant, so. There! The essence of sadness! A child could draw it. The mathematical formulae for apportioning space on a canvas will be set down in a little book. I have already worked them out. The painter need only read the book, go to the chemist’s shop, buy the specified pots of colour, and obey the rules. He will be a scientific and perfect painter. He can work in sunlight or gaslight, be a monk or a libertine, seven years old or seventy, and all the paintings will achieve the same architectural, impersonal perfection.”
Vincent blinked. Gauguin laughed.
“He thinks you’re crazy, Georges.”
Seurat mopped up the last drawing with his smock, then flung it into a dark corner.
“Do you, Monsieur Van Gogh?” he asked.
“No, no,” protested Vincent, “I’ve been called crazy too many times myself to like the sound of the word. But I must admit this; your ideas are very queer!”
“He means yes, Georges,” said Gauguin.
There was a sharp knock on the door.
“
Seurat’s mother came in. She had on a heavy robe and nightcap.
“Georges, you promised me you wouldn’t work all night any more. Oh, it’s you, is it, Paul? Why don’t you pay your rent? Then you’d have a place to sleep at nights.”
“If you’d only take me in here, Mother Seurat, I wouldn’t have to pay any rent at all.”
“No, thanks, one artist in the family is enough. Here, I’ve brought you coffee and brioches. If you must work, you have to eat, I suppose. I’ll have to go down and get your bottle of absinthe, Paul.”
“You haven’t drunk it all up, have you, Mother Seurat?”
“Paul, remember what I told you about the hairbrush.”
