Artwork · 19th century · Georges Seurat

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A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

Georges Seurat1884–86, border added 1888–89Oil on canvas207.5 × 308.1 cm

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At a glance

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Parisians spending a Sunday afternoon in the park on La Grande Jatte, an island in the River Seine.
Painted by Georges Seurat from 1884 to 1886, with a painted border added in 1888 to 1889.
The canvas is over ten feet wide, and every inch of it is built from small dabs of color.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

At the lower right, look near the feet of the woman with the parasol. A small monkey on a leash arches its back. In front of it a little dog with a curled tail dashes along. About two years after he began, Seurat came back to the canvas and added more figures, and this monkey was one of those additions.
Zoom in on the woman standing at the water's edge on the left. She holds a long fishing rod out over the river. Behind her, the water sparkles with short strokes of blue, green and orange laid side by side. She is fishing in her full Sunday dress.
Find the little girl in white near the center. Most of the people are seen from the side, but she faces us. Yet her face has no eyes, nose or mouth, only a soft blur of color. Seurat made posture and outline sharp instead of expressions.
Zoom in on the far right edge. Where the grass ends, a narrow band packed with blue and red dots runs down the side. This is the border Seurat painted on in 1888 to 1889, a few years after he first showed the picture.
Get very close to the shaded grass. There is no single flat green anywhere. Dots of blue, yellow, pink and pale green sit next to one another. Seurat believed that colors placed side by side, instead of mixed on the palette, would blend in the viewer's eye into a brighter color.

When it was painted

In the spring of 1884, twenty-four-year-old Seurat sent his first big painting, Bathers at Asnières, to the official Salon. It was turned down. He showed it instead at a brand-new exhibition run by independent artists, and there he met the painter Paul Signac. The two would push the new dotted technique forward together.

The island you can see across the river in Bathers at Asnières is La Grande Jatte. This time Seurat crossed over. Before starting the big canvas, he made a great many small oil sketches and drawings, and several larger canvases where he worked out the landscape and where each figure would go.

In May 1886 the painting hung at the last Impressionist exhibition. It was Camille Pissarro who brought Seurat and Signac into the show, while Monet and Renoir did not take part. That same year the critic Félix Fénéon gave the young painters' approach a name: Neo-Impressionism.

Seurat kept his private life almost entirely to himself. He lived with his model, Madeleine Knobloch, and they had a son in 1890, yet his family learned of them only days before his death. In March 1891 Seurat died suddenly of an illness. He was thirty-one.

In 1924 the Chicago collector Frederic Clay Bartlett bought the painting, and it came to the Art Institute of Chicago. He gave it as part of a collection honoring his late wife, Helen Birch Bartlett. In the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ferris's friend Cameron stands in front of it and stares and stares.

Now look at the lower left: a man in a cap and a sleeveless shirt, holding a long pipe. Right beside him sits a gentleman in a top hat. On this island on a Sunday, Seurat gathered people of different ages and walks of life into one picture.

The painter

Georges Seurat

1859–1891

All paintings by Georges Seurat →

More by the same painter

Study for "Poseuses"1886–87

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)1887–88

Questions to think about

Look for itHow many parasols can you count, and how many boats on the river?
Why?Why do you think Seurat painted a crowded park where almost no one seems to be talking to anyone else?
What about you?Like these people sharing a park but each keeping to themselves, do we sometimes sit together today while each of us looks only at our own screen?

Same period