Young Woman Powdering Herself

The woman at her dressing table is Madeleine Knobloch, Seurat's lover, and in the late 1880s in Paris he was keeping the relationship secret even from close friends. This is the only painting where he put a person from his own life on the canvas. And he originally put himself in it too. Scans have shown that the framed picture on the wall behind her was once a mirror, and in it Seurat had painted his own reflection, at his easel, brush in hand. A friend saw the early version and remarked on it, and Seurat, worried the private connection would be obvious, painted himself out and dropped in a little vase of flowers instead. He built the whole surface from his tiny separated dots of color. He died young, at 31, only a year or so after finishing it.