Knitting & Fine Art: Woman Knitting, Georges Pierre Seurat

In 1882, when Georges Seurat (1859–1891) made this drawing, he was just beginning to develop his singular painting style—the juxtaposition of hundreds of small dots of color to depict figures and landscape. In art school he had practiced drawing antique sculptures and details of old master paintings to learn how to use line and shading to describe form and volume. He learned these lessons so well that he was able, as this sketch shows, to suggest form simply through shading.

Above: Georges Pierre Seurat (1859–1891), Woman Knitting, 1882. Black crayon with metallic silver paint and black chalk on paper. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop.

Seurat used Conté crayon, a greasy medium that left the corrugated texture of his paper clearly visible. The shadowy background enfolds, even seeps into, the figure. It serves to concentrate our attention on the woman and her activity; we become as intent on our study of her as she is on her knitting. 

Related: Knitting for Menfolk 

Despite the absence of a well-defined line, we still see that the woman wears a proper middle-class suit, a tight-fitting jacket with neckerchief and long skirt. Her hat, probably embellished with an artificial flower, signals that she is outdoors in a public place, maybe a park. Over the centuries, many artists have depicted women knitting, but the vast majority of these figures are set in an interior space. When they appear outside, they are in private gardens. Only in the late nineteenth century, when cities were growing rapidly and becoming increasingly congested, was it deemed proper for middle-class women to go about in public alone to seek relief, and perhaps privacy, outside their homes. Seurat’s painting gives us a glimpse of this change to women’s spaces.

This solitary knitter is a thoroughly modern woman. Confident and independent, Seurat’s knitter takes advantage of public spaces, and the anonymity they confer, to carry on the age-old craft of knitting. 

—Fronia E. Wissman 

Originally published in Interweave Knits Spring 2006. 

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