Angelika am Felsen (nach Ingres)

In 1878 Georges Seurat was about 19, a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, still years from the small dots of colour that would make his name. Copying the masters was part of that training, and here he worked from Ingres's Roger Freeing Angelica, a scene from a 16th-century Italian poem in which a knight rescues a chained princess from a sea monster. Seurat kept only the woman. He cut away the knight, the monster, and the rescue, and left her alone against the rock, bound and waiting on what the tale calls the Isle of Tears. It is one of roughly 13 copies the young painter made after Ingres, whose cool, exact line he admired all his life.