Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was a French painter and draftsman of the late nineteenth century. He was born in Paris on 2 December 1859 and died on 29 March 1891 on the boulevard de Magenta, at the age of 31.

Seurat is counted among the Post-Impressionists. He devised the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. In pointillism, small separate dots of color are set down in patterns that together make up an image. His work is also linked with Neo-impressionism. Besides painting, he worked as a draftsman, including architectural drawing, and he made his drawings in conté crayon on paper with a rough surface.

His best-known works include A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Bathers at Asnières and The Circus Parade. Museums that hold his work include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the National Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay, the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Courtauld Gallery, the Barnes Foundation and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

The painting shown here, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, is the first of these. The Art Institute of Chicago calls it his largest and best-known painting. Seurat painted it in 1884–86, and the border was added in 1888–89. It shows Parisians strolling, lounging, sailing and fishing in the park of La Grande Jatte on the River Seine. The scene is built up from tiny dabs of different colors that viewers would see as a single hue, one that Seurat believed would be more brilliant. The picture is counted as a leading example of pointillist technique and as a founding work of Neo-impressionism.

The oil on canvas measures 207.5 by 308.1 centimeters. It is part of the Art Institute’s Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection and belongs to its department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe.