A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat (1859 to 1891) · 1884 to 1886
A summer afternoon on an island in the Seine just outside Paris, and about fifty people have come to sit in the shade, walk their dogs, fish, sail toy boats and show off their hats. A woman with a monkey on a leash strolls with a top hatted gentleman on the right, a girl in white stands in the exact centre and stares at you, and a man in a vest lounges on the grass at the left with his pipe. Nothing happens. The picture is as still as a frieze, and that stillness is the point: Seurat wanted to make modern life look as permanent and monumental as an Egyptian relief.
Step close and the surface dissolves into thousands of tiny dots of pure colour. Seurat built the painting from separate touches of orange and blue, green and pink, expecting them to blend in the eye of the viewer rather than on the palette. He called the method chromoluminarism; others called it pointillism. Look at the shadows on the grass, where you will find dots of violet and orange, and at the painted border of dots that Seurat added around the edge in 1889 to soften the transition to the white frame. The picture took him two years and more than sixty studies, and he was only twenty six when he showed it in 1886.
The canvas came to Chicago in 1924, bought by the collector Frederic Clay Bartlett, and it has left the museum only once since, so it has become the emblem of the institution. It appears in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where a boy stares at the girl in white until her face breaks into dots. A memorable detail is that the pigments Seurat used have shifted over time: the zinc yellow in the sunlit grass has darkened to a dull brown, so the painting was once a good deal brighter than it is today.
Did You Know? Seurat made more than sixty preparatory drawings and oil sketches for the picture, and one of the oil sketches hangs in the same gallery.
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