Excerpt from Felix Feneon’s "Les Impressionnistes en 1886" which was published in La Vogue as his critic of the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition of that year:
If you consider a few square inches of uniform tone in Monsieur Seurat’s Grande Jatte, you will find on each inch of its surface, in a whirling host of tiny spots, all the elements which make up the tone. Take this grass plot in the shadow: most of the stokes render the local value of the grass; others, orange tinted and thinly scattered, express the scarcely felt action of the sun; bits of purple introduce the complement to green; a cyanic blue, provoked by the proximity of a plot of grass in the sunlight, accumulates its siftings toward the line of demarcation, and beyond that point progressively rarefies them. Only two elements come together to produce the grass in the sun: green and orange tinted light, any interaction being impossible under the furious beating of the sun’s rays. Black being a non-light, the black dog is colored by the reactions of the grass; its dominant color is therefore deep purple; but it is also attached by the dark blue arising from neighboring spaces of light. The monkey on the leash is dotted with yellow, its personal characteristic, and flecked with purple and ultramarine. The whole thing: obviously merely a crude description, in words; but, within the frame, complexity and delicately measured out.
These colors, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina: we have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of light…His immense canvas, La Grande Jatte, whatever part of it you examine, unrolls, a monotonous and patient tapestry: here in truth the accidents of the brush are futile, trickery is impossible; there is no place for bravura—let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning…
The atmosphere is transparent and singularly vibrant: the surface seems to flicker. Perhaps this sensation, which is also experienced in front of other such paintings in the room, can be explained by the theory of Dove: the retina, expecting distinct groups of light rays to act upon it, perceives in very rapid alternation both the disassociated colored elements and their resultant color.
From Pages 36-38 of Seurat in Perspective edited by Norma Broude, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978.