On a Sunday afternoon, Parisians stroll, picnic and boat on the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine. Seurat built this huge canvas from countless tiny dots of pure colour over two years, founding pointillism and bringing Impressionism to a close.
Key facts
- Artist
- Georges Seurat1859–1891 · French
- Date
- 1884–86
- Period
- Post-Impressionism1886–1905
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 207.5 × 308.1 cm
- Location
- Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, United States
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#5D6059#343C37#B3AD92#82827F#999056Background
La Grande Jatte is an island in the Seine northwest of Paris, a popular weekend retreat for Parisians. Seurat went there almost daily and made some sixty drawings and oil studies.
The painting was shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where it caused great controversy. It signalled a new direction: scientific theory instead of intuition, order instead of improvisation.
In 1924 the Chicago collector Frederic Clay Bartlett bought the painting for the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains the museum's most famous work.
Technique & composition
Seurat studied the colour theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and others and found that dots of pure colour placed side by side mix in the viewer's eye at a distance, producing more vibrant colour than mixing on the palette. This is , also called .
The figures appear in stiff profile or frontal poses with simplified outlines, as solemn and still as Egyptian reliefs or Renaissance frescoes. The whole composition is carefully calculated, with horizontals and verticals interlocking in strict order.
Seurat later added a of dots around the edge, creating a colour transition between the painting and its frame.
Details
Symbolism
A panorama of modern society
Middle-class couples, soldiers, nannies, workers and children share the same lawn at leisure, yet hardly interact, each frozen like a statue.
The monkey and the woman fishing
at right may be a courtesan: in French slang, a female monkey could mean a prostitute. on the left may be another pun, since the French words for “to fish” and “to sin” sound almost the same.
Stories
- Did you know?
In 1984 Stephen Sondheim based the musical Sunday in the Park with George on the painting; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
- Did you know?
In the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a character stares at the little girl in the painting at the Art Institute, the camera moving closer until only dots remain, a famous scene in film history.
- Did you know?
Some of the yellow pigment Seurat used has turned brown, making the grass look duller than it originally did.
Legacy
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte launched Neo-Impressionism and influenced Signac, Pissarro and the young Matisse and Kandinsky. Its pursuit of colour science and compositional order paved the way for twentieth-century abstraction.
