Letzte Studie für „La Grande Jatte“

Before Seurat painted the huge park scene that made his name, he rehearsed it for the better part of two years, in something like 50 separate sketches. This is the last and largest of them, the full dress rehearsal for the finished picture. The Parisians are already here, strolling and sitting on the island in the Seine on a Sunday, but Seurat kept changing them, and several figures would shift or vanish before the final canvas. The paint is the real tell. Here it goes on in loose, patchy strokes of contrasting colour. In the finished mural he tightened all of it into the tiny separate dots that got named pointillism, a method he himself preferred to call divisionism, colours set side by side to mix in your eye.