"'A sudden stupid sickness carried him off in a few hours when he was about to triumph: I curse providence and death.'
"Art critic Jules Christophe, writing after the death of Seurat in La Plume, September 1, 1891...
"Seurat was not a struggling or impoverished artist who could not afford medical care. At a time when the average industrial worker was paid 150 francs a month, Seurat received a monthly allowance of 400 francs. He wore expensive top hats and black suits, which led Edgar Degas to dub him "le Notaire" (the Notary) (6). In spite of comfortable means and access to medically advanced Paris, Seurat chose to go to his mother's house and die there instead of going to a hospital, where tracheotomy or tracheal intubation might have saved him from asphyxiation. No record is available of Seurat's medical care during his lethal illness, and no autopsy was performed. We will never know what Seurat's achievements might have been if he had received medical treatment and lived to ripe old age, nor will we know if his son could have been a great artist himself."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294336/
To put matters in perspective: if Seurat had lived to the age of 86 like Monet, he would have died in 1945; had he lived to the age of 71 like his fellow Neo-Impressionist Signac, he would have died in 1930; had he lived to 78 like Renoir, he would have died in 1937. And so on.
Many accounts of Seurat's life and work say that "it is useless to speculate" on the direction his art might have taken had he lived longer. Well, we should consider that a challenge. And in fact some people have attempted such speculation:
"Where Seurat would have taken his art had he lived longer is a great 'what if?' Signac lived long enough to find the bold colors of proto-Fauvism creep into his pointillism. Would Seurat's misty Island of La Grand Jatte have glowed with neon, acid color? Would we know Seurat at all if his work had taken that same turn?"
http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2007/12/free-radical.html
"During the last few years of his tragically short life, Seurat began to explore the expressive possibilities of line and color in a systematic, scientific manner and, had he lived, his ideas would probably have resulted in a kind of scientific 'synthetism' parallel to the more intuitive synthetism of Guguin and the Symbolist painters of the Pont-Aven school. For Symbolism, in varying forms, was to be the main subjective current of anti-Impressionism during the last two decades of the century." Hugh Honour, A World History of Art http://books.google.com/books?id=qGb4pyoseH4C&pg=PT730&sig=e5cp3xBOUP9nIQ_QrdTr93y4m4
"Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in 1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around a single stylistic effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive.
"Had he lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of 70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left behind him by then? Possibly--if one can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91-something quite different from the calm, composed "Egyptian" classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters of Jules Cheret, for instance) and working-class entertainment (fairgrounds, circuses, cafes concerts) than anything he had made before.
"We would then remember Seurat not only as a great synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception but also as the artist who fused both with the exacerbated delights of the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century: the true "painter of modern life," as anticipated by Baudelaire. The history of modern art, in terms of its engagement with "low" culture, might then have been quite different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist but only hints of the second." Robert Hughes, "Against The Cult of the Moment" (TIME, Sept. 23, 1991) https://www.kenneymencher.com/2015/12/seurat-king-of-dot.html
Thoughts?