Georges Seurat Painted A Sunday On La Grande Jatte On...

Essay - 1,210 words

Georges Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte on canvas with oil pigments in 1844. In his work the artist used the pointillism
approach and the use of color to make his painting be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it
with at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship
and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape
planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize
and reiterate the two-dimensional plane of which it was painted on.

Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting. The subject of the painting is an
island newly adopted by the Parisian middle class as a place for quiet Sunday gatherings. The painting looks very realistic. The
figures and the way they are dressed look lifelike as does the beautiful landscape in the background. The colors and the painting
style, pointillism, make this painting very realistic. The question is, how does Seurat go about making the painting look so lifelike?
Pointillism was a major reason in why Seurats painting looks so lifelike.

During the painting of La Grande Jatte, Seurat simplified his brushwork to such an extent that his painting seems to be composed of
nothing but tiny, more or less circular dots. Seurats experiments with color led him to paint in small dots of color, which are arranged
in such combinations that they seem to vibrate. Individual colors tend to interact with those around them and fuse in the eye of the
viewer. This approach is not unlike the dots or pixels in a computer image. If you magnify any computer image sufficiently, you will
see individual colors that, when set together, produce an image. Seurat was interested in the way colors came about.

With the enhancement of the luminosity of colors made possible by the investigation of scientific optics, he saw positive merit in a
method in which the movement of the brush no longer demanded the slightest skill: Here the hand is, in effect, useless, deceit
impossible; no room for bravura items; let the hand be awkward, but let the eye be agile, perspective and skilled. There is a
mysterious vibration when one views La Grande Jatte. There is an effect of the paintings surface when ones eye glides inevitably
from dot to dot. This lets the eyes carry from the people located in the foreground to the beautiful landscape in the background.
However, the actual charm of pointillism in the awareness with which the colors can be seen, precisely because they do not merge
unconsciously on the retina. That is why La Grande Jatte, seen at close range, appears more interesting in color than from a
distance. Clearly Seurat was particularly concerned with the coloring of the painting.

The landscape was something that Seurat concentrated hardly on. Before the final painting, he made a large canvas painting of the
landscape without people. The shadow zones are dark, blue-green, and almost turquoise. Originally this picture was executed in small
strokes, laid over each other in cross-hatchings. Later, however, it was reworked in many places in the pointillist techniques.
Contemporary critics, who certainly recognized a certain distance from impressionism in the work, hardly noticed how highly
composed the landscape was. Seurat reduced this landscape to the broader format of the oil sketches. It was therefore made after
the landscape painting.

At the back on the Seine we see a streamer that was later retained, but w
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Georges Seurat Painted A Sunday On La Grande Jatte On