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It is also generally recognized that Seurat's genius was only in small part attributable to his method, to the science of optics or of anything else. He was a "divisionist," to be sure, but he was first & foremost a great painter—a master of complex composition (the receding planes in La Grande Jatte are extraordinary) and an inspired colorist. He produced only seven large, major canvases, but his hundreds of drawings and oil sketches are rarities in themselves, and his calm vacation seascapes painted at Honfleur and Grandcamp are among the finest chapters in the painted literature of the ocean.
In 1891, when he was only 31, Georges Seurat died of septic quinsy. It was only then that his closest friends in the Paris studios learned that this orderly gentleman, who had dined every day with his mother, had taken one of his models as a mistress and by her had a son (who died soon after his father, stricken by the same disease). One of Seurat's finest paintings, Jeune femme se poudrant, is of this woman, Madeleine Knobloch.