Man with a Beard (Portrait of Camille Pissarro?)

This delicate portrait was drawn early in Seuratʼs career when he was a pupil of Henri Lehmann at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The young artist became frustrated with the conservative curriculum and would soon develop his distinctive monochromatic drawing style. Here, the twenty-year-old Seurat has likely portrayed the forty-nine-year-old Camille Pissarro, a father figure to French avant-garde artists in the 1870s. Pissarro had also studied under Lehmann and would come to know Seurat better in 1885 when the younger painter began working on his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.