The Island of La Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the Neuilly. The painting was the result of Seurat’s ‘scientific’ approach to painting.
In creating the picture Seurat employed the then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with oranges and blue pigments.
Seurat used thousands of tiny dots of color and principles of color mixing. Seurat, who is known to be the ultimate example of the artist as scientist, used the technique of pointillism, or divisionism, on a massive canvas on order to depict a number of people enjoying a sunny afternoon in a park at the banks of the Seine River near Paris.
The scene includes forty-eight people, eight boats, three dogs, and a monkey.
Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people always their shapes, never their personalities. He had begun this painting on May 22, 1884, with little oil sketches on wood panels about the size of typewriter paper.
Indeed, it has become one of the most important works in what is still called the canon of Western art.
Seurat was only 26 when he first showed Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eight annual and final Impressionist Exhibition inm 1886.
It immediately changed the course of vanguard painting, initiating a new direction that was baptized “Neoimpressionism.”
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat
