A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884
Georges Seurat
1884/86
In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people from different social classes strolling and relaxing in a park just west of Paris on La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine River. Although he took his subject from modern life, Seurat sought to evoke the sense of timelessness associated with ancient art, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture. He once wrote, “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.”Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 using pointillism, a highly systematic and scientific technique based on the hypothesis that closely positioned points of pure color mix together in the viewer’s eye. He began work on the canvas in 1884 (and included this date in the title) with a layer of small, horizontal brushstrokes in complementary colors. He next added a series of dots that coalesce into solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance. Sometime before 1889 Seurat added a border of blue, orange, and red dots that provide a visual transition between the painting’s interior and the specially designed white frame, which has been re-created at the Art Institute.
| Title | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 |
|---|---|
| Artist | Georges Seurat |
| Date | 1884/86 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Style | Impressionism |
| Dimensions | 207.5 × 308.1 cm (81 3/4 × 121 1/4 in.) |
About Georges Seurat
Inspired by recently published research in optical and color theory, Georges Seurat distinguished his art from what the Impressionists considered a more intuitive painting approach by developing his own “scientific” style called Pointillism. Tackling the issues of color, light, and form, Seurat’s method juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors to create hues that he believed, through optical blending, were more intense and luminous.
Although Seurat embraced the subject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went beyond their concern for translating paint qualities of light in nature. Rather, Seurat sought to evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian Renaissance frescoes, although some contemporary critics found his figures to be less a nod to earlier art history than a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of modern Parisian society.
“Bedlam,” “scandal,” and “hilarity” were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work—A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884—when it was first exhibited in Paris. Recognized for its unusual technique, simplified figure types, and enormous scale, the monumental work is a manifesto of the new style of painting that broke with Impressionism.