Georges Seurat Analysis

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Georges Seurat played a major role in rescuing art from the technique and aesthetic of Impressionism, helping to re-establish classical order at a moment when painting was threatened with formlessness and dissolution. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was pained in 1884 by Georges Seurat. This was his largest painting, oil on canvas, measuring 81 ¾ X 121 ¼ inches. Seurat inscribed this magnificent painting in the lower right corner. Depicted is a beautiful narrative scene of people relaxing in the suburban park on the island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. Today the painting is located in Gallery 240 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Seurat was born in Paris on December 2, 1859 and attended the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts School in Paris. Seurat painted La Grande Jatte in three distinct "campaigns" and close examination of the work reveals the complexity of his technique. As we know from written documentation by the artist he began painting it in May 1884 and reworked it between 1885 and 1886. Seurat's…show more content…
Seurat believed that the discovery of the science, especially in the area of optics, were vitally important to the artist, and Seurat made great use of them. Seurat had his own theory, called Pointillism or Divisionism, which was based upon the idea that we see, physically, in terms of small quivering dots of color, which within the eye are transformed into the solidity of the image. When viewing this piece up-close, the color and brushwork appear quite varied and animated. His figures seem to convey a similar innocence like so many cutouts and show inspiration draw from Egyptian art and early Renaissance painting. The figures are solidly modeled and still. Although grouped in twos and threes, they do not seem to communicate with one another; they lack the Impressionists sense of life plausibly caught in a moment of
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