Seurat: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande

Georges Seurat is an artist whose work reflects his extensive theory of color, feeling for paint, and tireless effort to realize a formal structure with its own interior harmony. Seurat took from the impressionists their freshness of color, but like his fellow post impressionists – Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin – he went beyond surface appearance to inner reality. For these artists, the picture frame contains not merely a window giving on nature, but a definite area in which the artist creates the order or essence or rhythm behind the show of appearance.

          The island of la Grande Jatte is in the Seine River in Paris. Although it was an industrial site for many years, today it is the site of a public garden and housing development. In 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.

          Seurat spent two years painting this island, focusing scrupulously on the landscape of the park. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of color, light, and form.

Motivated by study in optical and color theory, he contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer’s eye. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.