Date: 21-08-2005
Owning Institution: The Art Institute of Chicago
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 19th Century          

The third of this month’s four pictures for summer is A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, by the French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. Painted between 1884 and 1886, this large and imposing canvas shows a group of Parisians enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon out in the park. The work hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

To match his modern subject matter, Seurat painted in what he himself declared to be a self-consciously modern style, rendering this snapshot of Parisian suburban park-life in a dense chromatic patchwork of little dabs or dashes of paint. This “pointillist” technique was derived by the artist from the colour theories advanced by the leading optical scientists of his time, particularly that of Michel-Jeune Chevreul, who had argued that the essence of visual experience consisted of a mass of rays of spectral light. But Seurat applied the technique with anything but scientific rigour, creating a work which, in the end, is more striking for its overall harmony of forms and colours than for its presumed optical accuracy. The result is a vision of the world that seems at once abstracted from reality, and eternally becalmed.

The “Grande Jatte” was an elongated island in the Seine just beyond the city limits. The central part of the island, bisected by a major arterial road connecting Neuilly to the suburb of Courbevoie, contained restaurants and a dance pavilion, while its two narrow ends were laid out as parkland. The nearby presence of docks and factories meant that this particular semi-rural retreat never enjoyed quite the same social cachet as, for example, the Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of Paris. This may have been significant to Seurat, and is perhaps an element of the meaning of his picture.

Seurat painted the northwestern shore of the island, facing Courbevoie. The time of day is about four o’clock in the afternoon. In the foreground, at the right, a man and woman have just entered the scene. Their bearing is stiff and upright. She carries a parasol and wears a dress with a prominent bustle, according to the fashion of the time. Close inspection of the man’s face, half-hidden by hers, reveals that he has adopted the affectation of a monocle. Their have the air of mannequins, almost of automata. In the left foreground a daydreaming artisan, probably a boatman to judge by his clothes, puffs on a long clay pipe. Behind him sits a diminutive top-hatted dandy, holding a slender cane in his left hand, accompanied by a young woman sewing, with a book, parasol and fan beside her.

In the middle and far distance, the painter has placed a multitude of other figures, arranging them in such a way that the eye is led back and through his composition in a series of criss-crossing diagonals. To follow just one of those diagonal lines, the affected couple in the right foreground is succeeded by a pair of young women seated on the ground, one holding a nosegay, the other a parasol; who are in turn succeeded by a mother and child who seem as stiff and statuesque as ancient Egyptian statues. Following that same diagonal, the eye is drawn to the figure a man blowing a trumpet, while behind him stands another man, looking out across the water, where a team of oarsman are rowing, where a steamboat is chugging gently towards some unknown destination, and where a white sailing boat’s sails are billowing gently in the wind.

The artist has plotted many other paths of sight through the picture, which offers a panoramic view of a particular cross-section of society – all of suburban Paris is here, it is implied – but also one that feels distinctly regimented, and organised. This seems appropriate to the subject. An artificial world, in which almost everyone appears to be on display, has been encapsulated in a work of art that is itself a masterpiece of high artifice. Seurat was fascinated by what might now be called the gentrification of that society’s outer reaches – the process by which those on the edges of the bourgeoisie seek to become fully part of it. That is why he chose a relatively unfashionable, suburban park as the setting for his picture, a place where such people congregated en masse. And it is probably why he gave the woman with the parasol in the immediate foreground a monkey as her pet – the ape being a traditional painter’s symbol for the spirit of emulation.

The painting’s large scale was more commonly associated with mythological subject matter than with depictions of ordinary, everyday life. The more art historically clued-up of the artist’s contemporaries would inevitably have been put in mind of that arcadia, peopled by gods and goddesses, conjured up two centuries earlier by the founding fathers of French landscape painting, Claude and Poussin. Seurat’s own, cannily updated version of that painted world of pastoral fantasy is shot through with a sense of irony and amused detachment. The tutelary deities of his semi-urban idyll are not drawn from classical poetry but modern life – a pair of stiff and awkward fashion victims.