A Sunday on La Grande Jatte shows Parisians of different ranks spending a summer afternoon in a park on an island in the Seine, just west of Paris. Georges Seurat built it over two years from tiny dots of color, and he made its people stand almost perfectly still on purpose.
Seurat started the canvas in 1884 and showed it in May 1886 at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, where the painters who had shown together since 1874 met for the final time. It is about seven feet tall and ten feet wide (207.5 by 308.1 centimeters), large enough that the dots only merge into a park when the viewer steps well back.
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In 1886, that stillness did not look like calm. The critic Alfred Paulet wrote that the strollers moved with "automatic" gestures, like lead soldiers.
The crowd was also stranger than a Sunday outing suggests. The art historian Sven Loevgren wrote that the island "seems also to have served as a modern Cythera, a rendezvous for the burghers of Paris and the city cocottes."
Cythera is the Greek island of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and a cocotte was a Paris word for a woman who lived off wealthy men. A painting of a respectable Sunday was set in a place with a reputation for something else, and in the foreground an elegant woman walks a monkey on a leash.
I don't read this picture as a picnic. I read it as a park where not everyone came for the same reason.
Who is the woman with the monkey?
Nobody knows, and the painting does not help. On the right side of the canvas, in the foreground, the elegant woman walks beside a man, her long-tailed monkey on its leash. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, owns one of Seurat's large oil studies for the picture and writes that the identity of the couple "has been much disputed."
The monkey is the problem. It has led some viewers to suggest that she is a prostitute, a reading the museum reports without endorsing. The museum adds that Seurat's intention "may have been less anecdotal."
A few writers extend the idea to the women at the water's edge holding fishing rods, which they take as a pun: women angling for men. The painting does not settle it, and I would not push it far.
What we can say is that the woman with the monkey was no afterthought: Seurat painted her in a small oil panel in 1884, now at the Smith College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, so she was part of the plan from the start.
Even the crowd around her is hard to sort. Seurat chose only the green park at the island's northwestern tip, facing the town of Courbevoie, and left out the dance halls, wine shops and shipbuilders' yards that the island also held.
The Art Institute of Chicago counts 48 people, three dogs and eight boats in what remains, and says the social standing and motives of the strollers "remain open to speculation and debate."
Whatever Seurat meant by the monkey, his larger aim explains why the woman, like everyone else, stands so still.
What You'll Discover
Why nobody in the park moves.
What lies under the dots.
What time did to the grass.