A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884

Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte between 1884 and 1886, working in a studio on the top floor of a building in the Batignolles quarter of Paris. He was 25 years old and had just finished his military service. The painting that emerged was the most deliberate, most calculated, and most controversial canvas of the decade. The painting shows Parisians at leisure on the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine, on a Sunday afternoon. Dozens of figures are scattered across a park: a woman with a fishing rod, a man playing a trombone, a girl running with a wreath of flowers, a couple dancing, soldiers in uniform, a woman with a monkey on a leash, a man standing with a top hat and a cane. The figures are frozen, facing different directions, not interacting. They look like mannequins arranged in a shop window. Seurat invented the technique he used for this painting. He called it Divisionism, and it involved painting with small dots of pure color placed side by side, so that the colors would mix in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. The painting contains millions of dots, applied with a fine brush over a period of two years. The result is a surface that shimmers when you stand at the right distance: about ten feet back, the dots blend into smooth tones of green, blue, and orange. Up close, the surface dissolves into a field of individual points. The painting was exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where it caused a sensation. The Impressionists had been painting with loose, rapid brushwork for twelve years, and Seurat's methodical, scientific approach felt like a rebuke. Camille Pissarro, who had adopted a similar pointillist technique, defended Seurat. Renoir and Monet, who had not, were appalled. The critic Felix Feneon coined the term Neo-Impressionism to describe Seurat's method, and the painting became the founding work of a movement that would last about five years before Seurat's death at 31 in 1891. Oil on canvas, 207 by 308 centimeters. Seurat built the painting in layers, starting with a dark underpainting and adding dots of color on top. The border around the painting, added in 1888-89, is painted in complementary colors: red dots next to green, blue next to orange. The figures are built in dots of warm and cool tones, with the shadows painted in dots of blue and purple rather than black. The horizontal format and complex composition make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or any room with enough wall space for a large print. The greens, blues, and warm earth tones pair with natural wood, white walls, and traditional furniture. The 18x24 size is the minimum to capture the detail of the figures. The painting has a strange, dreamlike quality that rewards long looking. The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1926, as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. It is the most famous painting in the museum and is on permanent display in the European Painting galleries. This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.