Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 Explained

In 1884 French painter Georges Seurat began working on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884. The mural-sized painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon in suburban Paris, with people of the lower-middle class relaxing at the painting’s namesake, La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine River. In the painting, Seurat incorporates well-known Parisian stereotypes, such as the woman in the right foreground whose leashed monkey identifies her as a person with loose morals. The man on the left with the top hat and cane is recognizable as a fashionable stroller of the Parisian boulevards. Although the painting portrays modern subjects, Seurat wrote that he intended to create the timelessness of a Classical Greek frieze with a canvas “organized by harmonies of color.” Inspired by contemporary writing on color theory, Seurat broke away from the spontaneity of Impressionism. He relied on scientific principles of light and color to create careful and precise compositions that helped define the emerging Neo-Impressionist movement. While working on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Seurat was creating pointillism, a technique that uses small dots of color that blend together when viewed from a distance. Seurat believed that separate touches of color would create more vibrant hues than those traditionally mixed on a palette. Now, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is Seurat’s best-known work. His use of color and form was essential to the development of Neo-Impressionism as well as the stylistic approaches of later movements and artists.