A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — Georges Seurat
In 1884, French artist Georges Seurat created one of the most iconic and recognizable works of art in the world. Currently hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago, A Sunday on la Grande Jatte is a roughly sixty square-foot painting without a single brush stroke.
Seurat is known as the father of Neo-impressionism, along with his student, Paul Signac. The two year long project consists of two-million individual dabs of paint that sit close to one another, creating what is known as pointillism.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte speaks to me because as a whole, it is greater than the sum of its parts, Seurat was able to take two-million individual dots to create a beautiful work of art. This painting exhibits the Parisian lifestyle, spending your days basking in the sun, enjoying nature, either by yourself, or with people you care about. The painting contains 48 people, all in different implied relationships, some appear to be couples, others could be parents and children, some alone. Although there are so many people in the painting, it manages to give off the impression of intimacy among the individual groups or couples. Some are casually dressed while others are more formal, La Grande Jatte is for everyone. This idea is further expressed by portraying a man lying down smoking from a pipe at the bottom left of the painting, and a young girl dancing in the sun towards the center-right of the painting. There is a woman that appears to be fishing, eight boats in the water, one is a rowing crew, and three dogs running around, La Grande Jatte is a place for activity.
In it’s first showing, the eighth impressionist exhibition in May 1886, La Grande Jatte became the most notable works of art in the entire exhibition and defined a new direction of painting. To me, La Grande Jatte is one of, if not the only painting that defines an entire genre or category of art.
La Grande Jatte evokes the desire for Spring to come. When I look at it, I want to spend time outdoors, in a setting that is social enough to watch families playing or crews rowing, yet intimate enough that one could have a private conversation and not feel overheard or that their privacy is being invaded. The knowledge that it took two years to complete La Grande Jatte that gives a feeling of stillness, as if one could go to that spot on that island today and see the same people enjoying their Sunday.
