Jeune femme se poudrant (étude)

This is a study for the only portrait Georges Seurat ever painted. The sitter is Madeleine Knobloch, the young woman he was quietly living with, so private about the relationship that even his close friends did not know she existed. She sits at her dressing table, powder puff in hand. Seurat built the finished picture up from studies like this one, in his method of countless small separate dots of colour set side by side. He was around 30 and had perhaps a year left to live. When he died suddenly in 1891, still in his early thirties, it was left to others to work out who the woman at the mirror had been.