A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Parisians relax by the Seine on a Sunday. Seurat built up the picture from thousands of tiny dots of pure colour over more than two years. The method is called pointillism.
Go close and the colours break up into dots; step back and they blend in the eye.
Georges Seurat was only 24 when he began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1884. He worked on it for about two years. Before the finished painting he made a large number of preparatory studies: small paintings on wooden panels done out on the island, and black crayon drawings of individual figures. The picture measures about two by three metres and was first shown in 1886.
La Grande Jatte is a long, narrow island in the Seine just north-west of Paris. On Sundays the city’s inhabitants went there to stroll, row and rest on the grass. The picture shows some forty people in the shade of the trees by the water. On the right an elegant couple walk along, the woman with a parasol and a monkey on a lead. On the left a man lies smoking a pipe. A girl in white walks with her mother in the centre. Further off are soldiers, boats, rowers and dogs.
The figures are stiff, motionless and mostly shown in profile. They look almost like statues or figures in an Egyptian frieze. No one looks at anyone else, and no one seems to be talking. The picture has therefore been read as a depiction of the loneliness of modern city dwellers. Others have seen irony in it, for example in the woman with the monkey, which may have been an allusion to a courtesan. Such readings are disputed.
Seurat built up the picture from small dots and short strokes of pure colour placed close together. The idea was that the colours would mix in the viewer’s eye and produce a clearer light than colours mixed on the palette. He was influenced by the scientific colour theory of the time, including that of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. The method is called pointillism or divisionism. He also used light and dark tones carefully to build up forms without hard outlines.
Seurat reworked the picture several times. A few years after it was first shown he painted a border of dots around it, as a kind of painted frame. He used a yellow pigment that has darkened over time. As a result the grass today has a browner tone than when the picture was new.
The picture was shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886. It attracted a great deal of attention and became the starting point for Neo-Impressionism, in which artists such as Paul Signac followed Seurat’s method. Seurat died as early as 1891, only 31 years old.
The painting was bought in 1924 by the American collector Frederic Clay Bartlett and given to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it hangs today. It has not been lent for many decades. The picture has become part of popular culture, including in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George and in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.