2-728-133 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

End of the Harvest, 1890s. The startling technique of this drawing reflects the ideas of the French painting movement known as Pointillism or Divisionism. Its most famous practitioner, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), developed a technique of dividing broad areas of colour into short strokes of individual hues of paint. Seurat's friend Charles Angrand was influenced by this method, and both artists developed a related technique for their drawings. In the sheet shown here, Angrand used a black, manufactured charcoal stick on a paper textured with tiny ridges. The highest of these ridges hold the charcoal, but the paper shows through in the small spaces between them. This creates the effect of a soft, diffuse, evening light that dissolves the curved shapes of haystacks and turns the landscape into an expansive abstraction of nature.