Description
Model Facing Front (study for Les Poseuses) – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
Model Facing Front is an 1886 study for the central figure of Les Poseuses, and among our paintings on canvas it is one of the quietest: a single standing nude on a bare ground, with nothing else in the picture at all. The original is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, dot by dot.
What is on the canvas
A woman stands facing us, weight on one leg, arms held close to the body, her head slightly lowered. She is painted from the knees up in warm ochres and pinks against a ground of cool blue-grey and green dots, so the body seems lit from the front while the air around it stays cold. There is no room, no furniture, no floor line — only the figure and the field of colour she stands in. Her face is summarised rather than drawn: this was a study of light on a body, not a portrait.
What a study was for, in Seurat’s method
Seurat did not sketch in pencil and then colour it in. He tested the colour itself, small panel by small panel, before committing it to a canvas two metres wide. This one settles the central pose of Les Poseuses — how far to turn the shoulders, where the shadow falls on the near leg. Seeing it beside the finished picture shows a method most painters keep hidden: the large work is not an inspiration but the last step in a sequence.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 26 cm high and 15.7 cm wide; we state width first and then height, so with us it is written 15.7 x 26 cm, and the table spells the order out in words as well. The details are read from the Musée d’Orsay’s own record: dated 1886, oil on canvas. Note that Seurat painted more than one study of this pose — this shelf carries two, and they are different panels, not two copies of one.
What you receive
The painting is made by our painter by hand, oil on canvas, in the size you choose, and to your own measurements if you prefer. The subject is upright and very simple, so it works where a picture should be quiet: a bedroom, a narrow wall, or hung as a pair with the second study. Because the ground is cool and the figure warm, it separates cleanly against either a pale or a deep wall. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the picture for approval before it leaves the studio. You choose the frame in our 3D application. Every artwork we sell is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1886 |
| Original size (width × height): | 15.7 x 26 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Musée d’Orsay, Paris |
This shelf carries the large canvas this study was made for — Les Poseuses, in which this figure stands at the centre — and a second study of the same pose, painted on a separate panel a year later.
