A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

By the mid-1880s the Impressionists had spent a decade chasing the fleeting glance, the quick sunlit sketch caught in an afternoon. Seurat did almost the opposite. He worked on this park scene for two years, from 1884 into 1886, going out to the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine to make studies, then building the whole thing in his studio out of countless tiny separate dots of colour. The idea was that blues and oranges set side by side would mix in your eye, not on the canvas, and glow more than a blended stroke ever could. So all these Parisians taking their Sunday by the river look strangely still, almost frozen, more like figures cut from card than people at rest. Look at the border of dots he painted around the edge and even the frame he wanted, part of the same experiment in getting light to sit right. The Art Institute of Chicago bought it in 1924, and it has rarely left the building since.