Although a receptive and conscientious student at the revered École, Seurat had been open to ideas from some more esoteric sources too. In 1879, with his friend, fellow École student, and future portrait-subject Edmond Aman-Jean, Seurat attended the fourth exhibition of paintings from the then very unrevered Impressionist painters, where they duly received an “unexpected and profound shock”. And although Seurat had already seen modern aesthetic theories summarised in Blanc’s Grammaire, he sought out the original texts from the theoreticians themselves, such those of David Sutter, the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, and the physicist Ogden Rood, whose Modern Chromatics was written while Seurat was at the École, and which the artist read as soon as it was translated into French in 1881. Having immersed himself in these authors’ works, Seurat borrowed heavily from their modern theories about colours and the way humans perceive them. These influences allowed Seurat to emerge from the venerable disciplines of the École to fashion his own distinctly modern method of using tone and colour.
