A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, painting by Georges Seurat completed in 1884–86.

In the 1880s the lower-middle classes flocked to the Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine River in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, for a riverside stroll and a picnic on Sunday afternoons. This was the kind of subject matter that the Impressionists had made fashionable, but Seurat was far from embracing that art movement’s pursuit of the fleeting and spontaneous. He made more than 70 preliminary oil sketches and drawings for this formalized image, with its careful composition and emphasis on simplified geometric forms. During his two years working on La Grande Jatte, Seurat was also developing the pointilliste technique of applying color in dots that were intended to fuse when seen from a distance, and it coexists here with his more conventional earlier style. The painting marks the birth of pointillism, which Seurat called “chromo-luminarism,” and of the movement later called Neo-impressionism. Seurat revised A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 in 1889, stretching the canvas in order to add a coloured border between the image and the white frame that encased it.

Some 40 figures crowd the canvas, mostly in profile or full face. At first glance, they appear static and frozen in an uncommunicative proximity. Many figures have been identified as known Parisian stereotypes. For instance, the woman standing in the right foreground, with the striking bustle, is identified by her pet monkey—symbol of lasciviousness—as a woman of loose morals. The seated man with the top hat on the left is a flâneur, a fashionable stroller of boulevards. The shift from a shaded foreground to a bright background creates a strong sense of depth to which the recession of figures contributes, although there are some disorienting shifts in scale. Seurat said that his aim was to represent modern life in the style of a classical Greek frieze.

Although the German critic Ernst Bloch saw the painting as a representation of hell, the river not the Seine but the Styx, it is full of subtle interactions among the characters and a quiet humour. Even so, it was not widely liked when it was first put on view; the Parisian critic and novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, for example, wrote of Seurat’s painting, “Strip his figures of the colored fleas with which they are covered, and underneath there is nothing, no soul, no thought, nothing.”

At 81.75 × 121.25 inches (208 × 308 cm), La Grande Jatte is a large and imposing painting that has long commanded the sustained attention of viewers, as depicted in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the hit film of 1986. It has been in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1926 and has become something of a landmark for the city.