Executed in 1890, George Seurat’s L'Homme à femmes was created as the cover illustration for novelist Victor Joze’s book by the same title. Joze’s roman à clef novel belonged to his La Ménagerie sociale series, a playful collection of stories about human behavior, drawing on characters from contemporary society. In the novel L'Homme à femmes, one of the two main characters, an impressionist painter working on a picture of the chahut, is likely modelled after Seurat. Other characters in the book include Edouard Normand, who is evidently Edouard Dujardin, former editor of Revue indépendante, and critic Paul Alexis, a real-life acquaintance of Seurat whom the artist also painted.

The discernible characters in Joze’s novel and the numerous collaborations between artists and authors at this time offer an interesting window into the French avant-garde art scene of the late 19th century. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, in fact, also created a number of illustrations announcing Joze’s works, including Reine de Joie, 1892, Babylon d’Allemagne, 1894, and Tribu d’Isidore, 1897. His only foray into illustration of this nature, Seurat was likely influenced by Jules Chéret’s poster L’Amant des Danseuses, 1888 for the cover of a novel by Félicien Champsaur, in which a similarly outfitted solitary male figure is also surrounded by a group of animated women.

In 1886, Seurat turned to the pleasure-seeking middle class of Paris as his main subject, often depicting scenes set in cafés or circuses. The women in L'Homme à femmes, with exaggerated features and smirking expressions, are near parodies of the artist’s other drawings of the café-concert singer, evidencing the artist’s delight in this caricatural style of draughtsmanship. The overall upward tendency of the dashed lines forming the composition in L'Homme à femmes further supports the light-hearted, jesting nature of the work and showcases Seurat’s superb and nuanced handling of line, form and shadow in his drawings. An equally charming oil painting of this subject executed in pointillist dream-like pastel colors is housed in The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, though it was ultimately the present drawing that was used as the cover for Joze’s novel. L'Homme à femmes was previously in the collection of Victor Joze himself and later belonged to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, adding further nuance to the fascinating story behind this exquisite work.