A Sunday on La Grande Jatte shows Parisians of every class on a day off, spread across a park on an island in the Seine. Georges Seurat painted it between 1884 and 1886 in tiny touches of pure color, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat began it in May 1884 and showed it two years later, after dozens of drawings, small oil panels and three larger studies. The museum counts 48 people on the canvas, three dogs and eight boats, all gathered on one stretch of riverbank.
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Seurat had a different aim for those 48 people. "I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes," he told the poet Gustave Kahn, and the friezes he had in mind were the carved processions of the Parthenon.
A crowd on its day off, painted as if it were marching in stone. The island had restaurants, shipyards and factories, and the museum notes that Seurat left all three out, keeping only the green park.
What remains looks like a holiday and behaves like a procession. In that frozen crowd, one woman walks a monkey on a leash, and nobody agrees on what she means.
Why does the crowd look carved in stone?
Because Seurat meant it to. The museum lists soldiers, boaters, families, couples and single men and women, strolling or sitting in the park, and every one of them is held in place like a figure on a frieze.
Seurat had painted another river scene in the same years. Set beside Bathers at Asnières, dated 1884 and now in the National Gallery in London, La Grande Jatte shows its men, women and children shrouded almost uniformly in shadow, and the figures come across as stiff, almost robotic.
He reached that stillness slowly. One of his large oil studies, a couple walking, survives at King's College, Cambridge, squared up in crayon, the grid a painter uses to carry a figure onto a larger canvas. Only three studies of that size are known to survive.
One of those stiff figures has been argued over for a long time: the woman with the monkey.
What You'll Discover
Why a monkey is on a leash.
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