Ladies and gentlemen, introducing my all-time favorite painting:
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
(Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte) 1884-1886
By Georges Seurat
- Piece: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte) 1884-1886. Now resides in the Chicago Art Institute. Took two years to complete. A huge piece of art at about 7X10 feet! No wonder it took him two years of little dots.
- Artist: Georges-Pierre Seurat
- Birth: Born December 2, 1859 in Paris, France
- Death: Died suddenly on March 29, 1891 of meningitis at age 31.
- Education: Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts 1878-1879
- Artistic Influences: Eugène Chevreul—discovered the basis for the pointillism technique. Nicholas Ogden Rood—studied color and optical effects important to Neoimpressionists. Rembrandt and Goya also influenced the young Seurat.
- Known For: One of the founders of Neoimpressionism. Contributed to the new notion that art did not have to follow the “impressionist” pattern. He will be remembered mainly for his style called pointillism, also called divisionism, which uses small dots of contrasting color to create small changes in form.
- Style: Neoimpressionist, used the technique of pointillism. This technique consists of using small, unmixed, closely packed dots of paint on a white background. To the eye, these points of paint blend creating a full, flowing work of art. Seurat treated art as a science.
- Other: In Seurat’s lifetime he completed seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks.
Here is Seurat’s personal description of his Sunday Afternoon:
“Under a blazing mid-afternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine, smart town houses on the opposite bank, and small steamboats, sailboats, and a skiff moving up and down the river. Under the trees closer to us many people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily on the bluish grass. A few are fishing. There are young ladies, a nursemaid, a Dantesque old grandmother under a parasol, a sprawled-out boatman smoking his pipe, the lower part of his trousers completely devoured by the implacable sunlight. A dark-colored dog of no particular breed is sniffing around, a rust-colored butterfly hovers in mid-air, a young mother is strolling with her little girl dressed in white with a salmon-colored sash, two budding young Army officers from Saint-Cyr are walking by the water. Of the young ladies, one of them is making a bouquet, another is a girl with red hair in a blue dress. We see a married couple carrying a baby, and, at the extreme right, appears a scandalously hieratic-looking couple, a young dandy with a rather excessively elegant lady on his arm who has a yellow, purple, and ultramarine monkey on a leash."