Der Frauenheld

In his last years Seurat, who would die in 1891 before he turned 32, kept turning his dotted method on the cheap nightlife of Paris. This little canvas belongs to that world. It shares its subject with a drawing he made to front a novel by his friend Victor Joze, also called L'Homme à femmes, about a man who chases the women of the café-concert. The faces are close to caricature, smirking and exaggerated, which was Seurat's playful register. He built even this small joke from separate touches of pure colour set side by side, the same painstaking system he used for his huge exhibition pictures. Painted around 1889, it is one of the lighter things he left behind.