The Models

Three nude models occupy the painter's studio - one figure shown from front, back, and side as she undresses and poses - while his own Sunday on the Grande Jatte hangs on the wall behind. Seurat made the Models partly to answer critics who claimed his dotted method could not handle the living nude. Now in the Barnes Foundation, it is among his most ambitious Pointillist works, a meticulous, luminous study of the studio and the body that wittily sets his modern, dotted figures against the great public painting that had made his name.