A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884
Georges Seurat
1884–86, border added 1888–89
In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris’s best friend Cameron Frye intensely studies this nearly ten-foot-wide painting during a scene set at the Art Institute. Featuring people of every age and social class on the banks of the River Seine, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 has captivated visitors ever since its arrival at the museum in 1924.If we, like Cameron, come closer to the painting, figures and forms dissolve into dots and dashes of complementary colors laid side by side, characteristic of Seurat’s pointillist technique. Many smaller painted and drawn sketches and several larger canvases, in which Seurat laid out the parameters for the landscape and figures, led up to this majestically composed scene. Seurat returned to the work two years after its start date, amplifying the silhouettes of some figures and adding others. Some of these, like the monkey on the leash, seem so integral to the final composition that it is hard to imagine them as add-ons, but others, like the man carrying a rolled newspaper in the furthest distance, are barely noticeable. To the artist, however, every decision was essential to his aim of making a painting of modern life equivalent to a classical Greek frieze.
| Title | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 |
|---|---|
| Artist | Georges Seurat |
| Date | 1884–86, border added 1888–89 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Style | Pointillism |
| 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.