Georges Seurat | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

In 1894, George Seurat began going out to an idyllic little island away from the urban center of Paris. It was a place where people of various classes would relax. While the image is of people at leisure, Seurat was anything but relaxed. He was a disciplined artist on a mission to create a work that would be significant in art history. He spent years developing this work. He made dozens of preparatory sketches to work out the composition and technique. 

While the 1890s was the heyday for Impressionists, Seurat was part of a new breed. Some consider him a post-impressionist or neo-Impressionist. Today his technique is called pointillism, but in his day, Seurat preferred the term divisionism. He was dividing the image into discrete bits, carefully painted, uniform dots of paint like pixels that make up our digital images. While his process was careful and hand-crafted, Seurat was fascinated by science. He developed his approach after reading the works of scientists like Michel Eugene Chevreul and Ogden Rood. One of the key concepts that Seurat latched onto had to do with how color is perceived in relation to its surroundings. Seurat read about the trouble restoring tapestries because they could not simply dye to match a piece, they had to account for surrounding colors. Seurat’s idea was that by dividing the image into discrete dots of color, the painter could arrange combinations that would heighten the contrast and make the colors more vibrant. Seurat wanted to make his work even more vibrant by painting a frame of colored dots around the perimeter of his painting and that was offset by a clean white painted frame.

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