1. Georges-Pierre Seurat
French Neo-Impressionist

2. Farm Women at Work (Paysannes au travail)
1882–83. Oil on canvas, 15 1/8 x 18 1/4 inches Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

3. 1884 79”x118” Oil on Canvas The National Gallery, London
Bathers at Asnières
”x118” Oil on Canvas The National Gallery, London

4. In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in 1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.
Seurat's use of this highly systematic and "scientific" technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists. Although Seurat embraced the subject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went beyond their concern for capturing the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. Seurat sought to evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian Renaissance frescoes. As he explained to the French poet Gustave Kahn, "The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color." Some contemporary critics, however, found his figures to be less a nod to earlier art history than a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of modern Parisian society.
Seurat made the final changes to La Grande Jatte in He restretched the canvas in order to add a painted border of red, orange, and blue dots that provides a visual transition between the interior of the painting and his specially designed white frame.
t took the French artist Seurat two years to complete this painting of a relaxed summer day in a park. The artist used very small brush strokes to cover this large canvas with tiny spots of color. This method was called pointillism. The grass in the park looks green—but if you look at one of the details of the lawn, you can see that it is made of separate spots of color, orange and blue along with green. At a distance, these different colors merge in your eye to appear as green. How many animals do you see? Where is the butterfly?
Examination: Seurat's Artistic Process for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte An in-depth look at the making and meaning of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte , Book: French Impressionists Brettell, Richard. French Impressionists. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987, p
Just weeks after he had exhibited The Bathers at Asnieres (National Gallery, London) in the spring of 1884, Seurat began work on a painting that is most often considered the masterpiece of his career, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Exhibited in 1886 at the final Impressionist exhibition, the painting created immense controversy and occupies a position in French nineteenth-century art equal to that of Manet’s revolutionary Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass of 1863, both now in the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the artist began the painting as a mate to The Bathers at Asnieres. In fact, when it was begun, the Grande Jatte was identical in scale to the earlier canvas. (Seurat later added the dotted "frame" by restretching the original canvas to include part of the tacking margin). However, as he worked on its composition, the growing complexity and the number and variety of figures forced him to treat it as a completely separate composition. Seurat began visiting the island of the Grande Jatte, near the Paris suburb of Neuilly, in the summer of His first trials for the composition were probably small oil sketches painted inside the tops of his father’s discarded cigar boxes. These little sketches, as Seurat called them, were easily portable and could be thrown away or repainted with ease. The Art Institute’s oil sketch differs in so many ways from the final painting that it must have been executed relatively early in the young painter’s search for both a setting and interesting figural groups. After Seurat determined his composition, he made detailed drawings of trees and figures, before painting two small studies on canvas — one of the landscape without figures, which is in the collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, and the other of the entire composition, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Before he made either of those more finished canvases, Seurat executed the fine chalk drawing of trees reproduced here. It is not known exactly when he began to work on the final painting, but it was most likely during the winter of , in preparation for the spring exhibitions of However, when spring came, Seurat did not exhibit. In October 1885, the artist showed the work to Camille Pissarro, who seems to have criticized the painting for its stiffness and found that, like the large version of The Bathers at Asnieres, it lacked the brilliance of the oil sketches. To correct those problems, Seurat reworked the painting between October 1885 and May 1886, when he finally exhibited it. Seurat’s reworking took two forms. First, he altered the major figures in the foreground of the composition; their contours became fuller, more curvilinear, and more decorative, releasing them from their strictured confines and giving the whole a more relaxed, leisurely appearance in keeping with the theme of an afternoon’s recreation. His second change was to introduce more vivid oranges, greens, and yellows into the painting so as to give it the brilliance it seemed to lack. To achieve this result, Seurat developed a dot technique to key up and intensify large areas of the canvas without completely repainting it. As he worked on the painting, he became obsessed with the formal and theoretical possibilities of the dot, which preoccupied him for at least the next five years. Many attempts have been made during the last generation to define the real subject of Seurat’s masterpiece. For some, Seurat painted the middle classes at leisure on Sunday as a complement to his earlier representation of the working class in his Bathers at Asnieres.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – Oil on canvas 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 in. Art Institute of Chicago

5. Detail of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Where do you see
warm and cool
colored dots
placed side by
side?

7. La Grande Jatte [It’s empty!]
1884 Private collection

8. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – microdetail, above the dog
In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in 1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.
Seurat's use of this highly systematic and "scientific" technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists. Although Seurat embraced the subject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went beyond their concern for capturing the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. Seurat sought to evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian Renaissance frescoes. As he explained to the French poet Gustave Kahn, "The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color." Some contemporary critics, however, found his figures to be less a nod to earlier art history than a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of modern Parisian society.
Seurat made the final changes to La Grande Jatte in He restretched the canvas in order to add a painted border of red, orange, and blue dots that provides a visual transition between the interior of the painting and his specially designed white frame.
t took the French artist Seurat two years to complete this painting of a relaxed summer day in a park. The artist used very small brush strokes to cover this large canvas with tiny spots of color. This method was called pointillism. The grass in the park looks green—but if you look at one of the details of the lawn, you can see that it is made of separate spots of color, orange and blue along with green. At a distance, these different colors merge in your eye to appear as green. How many animals do you see? Where is the butterfly?
Examination: Seurat's Artistic Process for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte An in-depth look at the making and meaning of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte , Book: French Impressionists Brettell, Richard. French Impressionists. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987, p
Just weeks after he had exhibited The Bathers at Asnieres (National Gallery, London) in the spring of 1884, Seurat began work on a painting that is most often considered the masterpiece of his career, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Exhibited in 1886 at the final Impressionist exhibition, the painting created immense controversy and occupies a position in French nineteenth-century art equal to that of Manet’s revolutionary Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass of 1863, both now in the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the artist began the painting as a mate to The Bathers at Asnieres. In fact, when it was begun, the Grande Jatte was identical in scale to the earlier canvas. (Seurat later added the dotted "frame" by restretching the original canvas to include part of the tacking margin). However, as he worked on its composition, the growing complexity and the number and variety of figures forced him to treat it as a completely separate composition. Seurat began visiting the island of the Grande Jatte, near the Paris suburb of Neuilly, in the summer of His first trials for the composition were probably small oil sketches painted inside the tops of his father’s discarded cigar boxes. These little sketches, as Seurat called them, were easily portable and could be thrown away or repainted with ease. The Art Institute’s oil sketch differs in so many ways from the final painting that it must have been executed relatively early in the young painter’s search for both a setting and interesting figural groups. After Seurat determined his composition, he made detailed drawings of trees and figures, before painting two small studies on canvas — one of the landscape without figures, which is in the collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, and the other of the entire composition, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Before he made either of those more finished canvases, Seurat executed the fine chalk drawing of trees reproduced here. It is not known exactly when he began to work on the final painting, but it was most likely during the winter of , in preparation for the spring exhibitions of However, when spring came, Seurat did not exhibit. In October 1885, the artist showed the work to Camille Pissarro, who seems to have criticized the painting for its stiffness and found that, like the large version of The Bathers at Asnieres, it lacked the brilliance of the oil sketches. To correct those problems, Seurat reworked the painting between October 1885 and May 1886, when he finally exhibited it. Seurat’s reworking took two forms. First, he altered the major figures in the foreground of the composition; their contours became fuller, more curvilinear, and more decorative, releasing them from their strictured confines and giving the whole a more relaxed, leisurely appearance in keeping with the theme of an afternoon’s recreation. His second change was to introduce more vivid oranges, greens, and yellows into the painting so as to give it the brilliance it seemed to lack. To achieve this result, Seurat developed a dot technique to key up and intensify large areas of the canvas without completely repainting it. As he worked on the painting, he became obsessed with the formal and theoretical possibilities of the dot, which preoccupied him for at least the next five years. Many attempts have been made during the last generation to define the real subject of Seurat’s masterpiece. For some, Seurat painted the middle classes at leisure on Sunday as a complement to his earlier representation of the working class in his Bathers at Asnieres.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – microdetail, above the dog

9. Lighthouse and Mariners’ Home, Honfleur 1886, oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 32 1/4”, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

10. 1886, oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 25”, The National Gallery, Prague
La Maria at Honfleur
1886, oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 25”, The National Gallery, Prague

11. Port-en-Bessin, The Outer Port (High Tide)
1889, oil on canvas, 26 1/8 x 32 1/4”, Musee d’Orsay, Paris

12. Invitation to the Circus: Sideshow
"Circus Sideshow" (or "Parade de Cirque") is one of six major figure paintings that Seurat produced during his short career. More compact than his other mural-size compositions, and more mysterious in its allure, Seurat's first nocturnal painting debuted at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. On a balustraded stage, under the misty glow of nine twinkling gaslights, a ring master (at right) and musicians (at left) play to a crowd of potential ticket buyers, whose assorted hats add a wry and rhythmic note to the foreground.
Seurat made on-site sketches in the spring of 1887, when Fernand Corvi's traveling circus was set up in a working-class district of Paris, near the place de la Nation; he then developed the composition through several preparatory studies. "Circus Sideshow" represents the first important painting Seurat devoted to a scene of popular entertainment. Met Museum
Invitation to the Circus: Sideshow
”x59” Oil on Canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

13. Invitation to the Circus: Sideshow – detail, man with a cane
Oil on Canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

14. Eiffel Tower 1889 9”x6” Oil on panel
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

15. Young Woman Powdering Herself
”x31” Oil on canvas Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

16. Le Chahut 1889-90 66”X54” Oil on Canvas Rijksmuseum, The Netherlands

17. The Circus
”x60” Oil on Canvas Musée d’Orsay, Paris

18. The Circus - detail
x 46 cm Oil on Canvas Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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