Darwin and Seurat

Complex online lecture from the National Gallery speculating on the influence of Darwin’s ideas on the artist Georges Seurat.

Emmelyn Buttterfield, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, talked us through this complex argument focusing on Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jette” of 1886. Noting that the ideas of Darwin were being widely discussed and that the anatomist at the Ecole de Beaux Artes was an advocate of them she outlined visual links in the picture.

This argument mainly revolved around the figure of the monkey as Darwin was often depicted as a monkey in cartoons and in some examples had a similar serpentine tail to the one in the painting. She also discussed how the woman holding the monkey’s lead can be seen as a sexualised figure mirroring ideas of reproduction in Darwin.

As you may have guessed from my tone I didn’t fully understand the argument and felt it may have been conflation of ideas around at the time which may not have been conscious on the part of Seurat.

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