Georges-Pierre Seurat: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1883 – 86)

Another large canvas, this is the seminal Divisionist work entirely using Pointillism with strong areas of contrasting light and shade. There is also a tension between the flatness of the stylised forms, inconsistent perspective and the great depth implied through the traditional perspective thus uniting Renaissance sensibility with the Modern approach. Seurat was fascinated by the problem of using pigment to represent reflected light and hoped that through the use of pure colour applied meticulously with the tip of a brush, his method of Pointillism would create much more vivid colour. He made many sketches and studies when planning this piece and took more than two years to complete the finished painting.

La Grande Jatte was a fashionable leisure spot for wealthy Parisians and is opposite the riverbank at Asnières – the row-boat seen in the previous painting is heading here. Whereas the bathers at Asnières are enjoying limited leisure time whilst their factories loom in the hazy background, here the scene has a stillness and timelessness about it, and from this side of the river the factories are obscured by trees.

Here, though, many of the figures are reduced almost to graphic motifs and are not portrayed in as real a way as the bathers were. In fact they are made to look toy-like, almost wooden. So here are the rich, fashionable elite strolling in the patchwork shade of decorative trees in the stiffness of their fine clothes. They are less human than the working class, and some of these rich folk are looking toward the Asnières bank of the river in a way that seems perhaps envious. As they are stifled in buttoned-high dresses and jackets, the workers are shirtless and splashing in the cool waters. It is only the children, animals and one man who are portrayed as natural and relaxed.

The man at the bottom left of the canvas seems a little out of place and he is the only person with a natural face that could possibly be a portrait. His arms are bare and the pipe he smokes is a simple, cheap type. He is probably the ‘butler’ of the nearby picnicking couple, or the oarsman who has rowed them along the river. His foot actually extends beyond the edge of the composition toward the bathers. Perhaps he has ‘a foot in the other camp’, his allegiance lying with his working class comrades.

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Fine scan of this painting, with accompanying text by Sister Wendy, at the Artchive