模特们

Critics had told Seurat that his dot-by-dot method was cold and mechanical, fit for parks and factories but not for living flesh. Between 1886 and 1888 he set out to answer them directly, taking on the nude, one of the oldest and most respected subjects in painting, and building three models entirely out of tiny points of colour. He posed them in a corner of his own studio, and on the left wall he painted part of his huge Sunday scene of La Grande Jatte, so his crowd of stiff park-goers hangs just behind the bare figures. The same woman appears three times, seen from the back, the front, and the side, like a single body turned for study. Their discarded clothes and a parasol lie heaped on the floor, everyday things rendered in the same patient speckling as their skin.