Painted when
he was just 26 years old, Georges Seurat’s masterpiece A Sunday on La
Grande Jatte is one of the most famous and recognizable paintings in the
world. For two years Seurat
prepared La Grande Jatte through many earlier works and studies—28
drawings, 28 panels, and 3 canvases. The
painting was first displayed at the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition in
1886 and spurred a new style called “Neo-Impressionism.”
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Seurat used a
new “divided-color technique” in which he juxtaposed small dots of different
colors on a canvas rather than mixing them on his palette. He believed that this new color theory, most often called
“pointillism” (but also known as “optical fusion” or “Illusionism,”
and by the painter as “Chromoluminarisme” or “Peinture Optique”),
allowed the viewer to see the colors more vividly as the viewer’s eye mixed
the colors. This effect is called
“simultaneous contrast” as complementary colors are placed adjacent to
others in order to intensify the painting. |
La Grande
Jatte depicts the north
side of an island just beyond Paris called La Grande Jatte and the town
of Courbevoie on the opposite shore.
It was a place where city dwellers gathered on the weekends to stroll,
lounge, and enjoy the Seine. Many
view Seurat’s painting as a stage set (the island) with characters placed
throughout the scene (3 dogs, 8 boats, and 48 people).
La Grande
Jatte has been on view at
the Art Institute of Chicago since 1924 with nearly 1.5 million annual visitors
to the museum. Currently the
painting is in a show entitled “Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte.”
As part of the exhibition scientists used X-rays to study how the
painting was painted and how time has changed the image over the years.
Sources:
Art Institute of Chicago (www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Impressionist/pages/IMP_7.shtml,
www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/seurat/seurat_overview.html,
www.artic.edu/aic/students/sciarttech/global_pages/g3_4.html)
RIT News (http://www.rit.edu/~670www/newws/Hightlight/news_story.php3?id=1239
http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/ap/topics/colour/colour.html