In May 1886, Georges Seurat exhibited A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris. The painting was approximately ten feet wide and seven feet tall, and it had taken him two years to complete, including more than sixty preparatory drawings and oil sketches. The response was divided between fascination and ridicule. Critics noted that the figures had a strange, rigid quality, that the technique looked like a screen of colored dots rather than brushwork, and that the whole composition had an eerie, hieratic stillness that was unlike anything Impressionism had produced before.
Seurat was twenty-six years old. He would only live five more years, dying in 1891 of what was probably diphtheria, at thirty-one. La Grande Jatte is his most significant work, and one of the most technically ambitious paintings of the nineteenth century.
The Island and the Afternoon
La Grande Jatte is a real island in the Seine River near Paris, which in the 1880s was a popular destination for working-class and middle-class Parisians on Sunday afternoons. Seurat made dozens of trips to the island between 1884 and 1886, making drawings and oil studies of the landscape and the people who gathered there. The final painting condenses multiple observations into a single, comprehensive Sunday scene: families with children, couples walking, a soldier and his companion, a woman with a monkey on a leash, fishermen, boatmen.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1886. Art Institute of Chicago. Wikimedia Commons.
There are approximately forty-eight figures in the painting, along with three dogs, a monkey, several boats, and large areas of shadow and light on the grass. The scene is organized along horizontal bands: the river in the background, the bank behind the figures, the shadows in the middle ground, the sunlit grass in the foreground. The figures are arranged with a geometric regularity that does not occur in nature. They are positioned like chess pieces, perpendicular to each other and to the picture plane.
How Pointillism Works
Seurat called his technique "chromoluminarism" or "divisionism." The term "pointillism" was coined by critics as a somewhat mocking description of the method and was not Seurat's preferred term. The technique was based on his reading of color theory, particularly the work of Michel Eugène Chevreul on simultaneous contrast and of Ogden Rood on optical color mixing.
The fundamental idea is that small dots of pure color placed adjacent to each other will mix optically in the viewer's eye rather than physically on the canvas. Mixing pigments together produces muddy intermediate colors; mixing light produces more vibrant results. By applying pure unmixed color in small, precise touches, Seurat aimed to approximate the luminosity of light mixing rather than the dullness of pigment mixing. The painting is composed entirely of small brushstrokes of unmixed color, sometimes as small as a millimeter.
In practice, the optical mixing only works at a distance. Up close, La Grande Jatte resolves into thousands of individual dots of color: orange beside blue, yellow beside violet, green beside red. The complementary pairs vibrate against each other, creating a visual shimmer. Step back twenty feet and the colors blend into the recognizable Sunday scene. The painting is simultaneously two different things depending on where you stand.
The Strange Stillness
What strikes viewers most about La Grande Jatte is its peculiar atmosphere. This is a leisure scene, a park full of people relaxing on a Sunday afternoon, but no one in the painting appears to be enjoying themselves. The figures are stiff and silent. No one makes eye contact with anyone else. No one is laughing or talking. Children play but do not seem joyful. The woman with the monkey holds herself with rigid formality.
This quality was partly intentional. Seurat was interested in the way Egyptian and Greek art conveyed permanence and dignity through frontality and perpendicularity. He studied the ancient frieze as a compositional model. He wanted his contemporary leisure scene to have the timeless quality of ancient art. What he produced instead, somewhat accidentally, was a vision of alienation: a crowd of people who are together but isolated, a community in which no genuine human contact takes place. The painting is a perfect Impressionist subject treated in a way that makes it feel anything but Impressionist.
The Influence
La Grande Jatte was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924, where it has been ever since. Its influence on twentieth-century painting was substantial: Paul Signac continued and elaborated Seurat's divisionist method; Vincent van Gogh tried the technique briefly; Henri Matisse and Fauvism drew on its insistence on pure, unmixed color. The systematic quality of the method appealed to artists interested in painting as a rational practice rather than an expressive one.
The painting was also the subject of one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1980s: Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George (1984) dramatizes Seurat's creation of the painting and the social world it depicts. The musical won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which is an unusual fate for an art history story and a testament to the painting's continuing cultural vitality.
