La Grande Jatte (Study VI)

In the summer of 1884 the island of La Grande Jatte, in the Seine just west of Paris, was a place people went on their day off, to stroll, sit on the grass, and watch the river. Georges Seurat went there to work. This little panel, small enough to hold in one hand, is one of dozens of oil studies he made outdoors on the spot, testing the light, the colour of the grass and water, where a figure might stand. Back in the studio he spent the better part of two years assembling those observations into a single canvas about two metres tall and three across, laying the paint down in countless small separate touches of colour. That finished picture, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, now hangs in Chicago. What you have here is the opposite of it, quick and worked from life, the raw sketch a very slow and deliberate painting was built out of.