Everyone knows the iconic “Ferris Buellers Day Off” and the scene where they visit the Art Institute of Chicago and look at “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. I was actually able to visit this painting at the Institute several summers ago. Now that I am a Fine Arts major, I was curious about the history behind the artist and the work. Here is what I found:
Georges Seurat was a 19th- century French artist. His most famous work is a painting entitled "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" which he painted when he was 26 years old. Seurat was truly an exceptional talent who sparked a revolutionary new painting technique. The focal point of his career was the progression and maturation of the science behind color and art. His theories led him to develop Pointillism, which was a different artistic style where paintings were comprised of tiny colorful dots.
This is "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." I chose to study this piece because I was able to see it on display at the Art Institute of Chicago several summers ago. It is a larger painting than you might realize being about 7 by ten feet. The Institute bought it back in 1923 for about $24,000 which might could sell for around 650 million today. Seurat died at 31 from a tuberculosis or diphtheria type illness and this piece of art was not seen by many people again until it came to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat began painting it with oil on canvas in 1884 and it took about two years to complete. The entire composition shows middle and upper-class Parisians enjoying their day at a park somewhere along the River Seine. It is interesting to see the dress of the time period with women in their long sleeves and long skirts with bustles holding their sun umbrellas in what appears to be popular French fashion. The gentlemen, too, are decked out whether formally in top hats, canes, and suits, or more informally in their derby hats, sweaters, and trousers. The park is a family affair with children dressed sweetly, and the family dogs enjoying the outing. If you look closely you may see some scenes you would not expect like a woman with a monkey on a leash with a man on her arm or a woman with a fishing pole which may represent prostitution, which is said to have taken place in the park at times. The water's edge of the beautiful River Seine is a scenic place to enjoy the water and the sailboats lazily gliding by. It must be noted that much of the picture with emphasis on the foreground has people shaded either because of the trees, the angle of the sun, or of course, the umbrellas. The shade was put in there for a purpose. Maybe it shows that the park was a rest from the hot Paris sun and a place to escape for privacy and reflection even in a crowd. Maybe it makes us wonder what happened to these people as the shadows turned to night. Maybe he was showing that people will one day move to a brighter future. The shade could have represented the darker events such as prostitution that went on behind the scenes. Many say the child in the white dress in the middle in full sun is the focal point. She seems to be looking right at the audience. Maybe she is dressed in white for innocence and purity, a childhood spent with a family that would enjoy days at the park. Or maybe she has not learned all of the hardships of the world yet. We have to wonder why he chose to make his figures sort of angular and immobile. Perhaps it is a way of showing the uptightness and rigidness of the social class in modern Paris at the time. It does give also a sense of formality and structure. He had in mind the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Phoenician arts and wanted Parisians to have that same look as the early art did on friezes.
It doesn't take long to realize when you look at this expansive piece that it was not done with broad brush strokes. Rather, it is a leading example even to this day of what is called the pointillist technique. Seurat preferred to call this technique "Divisionism" or "chromo-luminarism" which referred to color and light. It can be best described as "contrasting miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors" that when they are put together by people's eyes looking at the piece as a whole it would look like a single shade or hue and make the piece more colorful and vivid, so basically it is made up of millions of dots. He studied other artists and their use of layering color like Michel Eugene, Chevreul (who developed the color wheel), Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc (major influence on Neo-Impressionism.) Seurat also adopted the theories of David Sutter ("the harmony of art being not that dissimilar to that of music") and Charles Henry (a mathematician who believed in the "emotional relevance" of lines and color.) He is considered to be the founder and father of Pointillism, and is best known for this unique method along with fellow artist Paul Signac who can share in the same title and was able to produce more works simply because he lived longer than Seurat.
To get this look into the everyday life of Parisians at the park, he spent many hours there just watching and drawing many sketches, about 50, of the landscape, people, dogs, and water. This approach enabled him to capture the color, light, and movement of the scene before him. He revisited the scene many times before completing the final large-scale painting in 1886. He didn't paint it little by little and declare it finished. He actually reworked the original and did many preliminary drawings beforehand. In the first stage, he used earth pigments like ochre and burnt sienna. As he continued he added vermilion, emerald green, and cobalt blue, and a new pigment of the time zinc chromate which was yellow. It has dulled over time to a brownish tint and restorative ideas have been achieved digitally. He re-stretched the canvas in 1889 to allow room for a border of red, orange, and blue dots re-framed in a specially made wooden frame painted white which is still how it is viewed today. He knew this would make the colors pop and the scenes stand out.
This painting was first exhibited at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Critics in the beginning at the Impressionist Exhibition were super critical. They said his people looked like tin soldiers, when they were meant to sort of look more like Egyptian hieroglyphics. The technique of Pointillism is considered Post-Impressionist, because the true Impressionists used small dabs of paint, Pointillism took it to the next level by using the small individual dots of color to paint the entire painting. Impressionism at this time was in need of some new energy and direction, so Seurat and others like Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin moved others toward Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism in the 1880s and the 1890s. This movement put the focus on the science and theory of color and moved toward capturing the finer details rather than just trying to capture the moment in time with proper light and dabs of paint. This was occurring alongside changes in industry and science which caused social changes in Europe at the time. This was reflected through Seurat's art as well. Seurat believed that his works were based on science of the color pigments and optics of the eye, and that he could make his audience feel emotion and create harmony through color effects. Computer screens today use tiny dots called pixels which is much like Pointillism, and modern artists of today still use this technique. Through Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, he gave modern-day figures a sense of significance and permanence while his experimental brushwork and color combinations kept the scenes vivid and engaging.
