georges seurat sailboat painting

Georges Seurat

French Draftsman and Painter

Summary of Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Pointillism , or Divisionism , an approach associated with a softly flickering surface of small dots or strokes of color. His innovations derived from new quasi-scientific theories about color and expression, yet the graceful beauty of his work is explained by the influence of very different sources. Initially, he believed that great modern art would show contemporary life in ways similar to classical art, except that it would use technologically informed techniques. Later he grew more interested in Gothic art and popular posters, and the influence of these on his work make it some of the first modern art to make use of such unconventional sources for expression. His success quickly propelled him to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde . His triumph was short-lived, as after barely a decade of mature work he died at the age of only 31. But his innovations would be highly influential, shaping the work of artists as diverse as Vincent Van Gogh and the Italian Futurists , while pictures like Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884) have since become widely popular icons.

Accomplishments

• Seurat was inspired by a desire to abandon Impressionism's preoccupation with the fleeting moment, and instead to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. Nevertheless, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, from his love of modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure, to his desire to avoid depicting only the 'local', or apparent, color of depicted objects, and instead to try to capture all the colors that interacted to produce their appearance.
• Seurat was fascinated by a range of scientific ideas about color, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colors of a particular warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. He also pursued the discovery that contrasting or complementary colors can optically mix to yield far more vivid tones that can be achieved by mixing paint alone. He called the technique he developed 'chromo-luminism', though it is better known as Divisionism (after the method of separating local color into separate dots), or Pointillism (after the tiny strokes of paint that were crucial to achieve the flickering effects of his surfaces).
• Although radical in his techniques, Seurat's initial instincts were conservative and classical when it came to style. He saw himself in the tradition of great Salon painters, and thought of the figures in his major pictures almost as if they were figures in monumental classical reliefs, though the subject matter - the different urban leisure pursuits of the bourgeois and the working class - was fully modern, and typically Impressionist.
• In Seurat's later work he left behind the calm, stately classicism of early pictures like Bathers at Asnières , and pioneered a more dynamic and stylized approach that was influenced by sources such as caricatures and popular posters. These brought a powerful new expressiveness to his work, and, much later, led him to be acclaimed by the Surrealists as an eccentric and a maverick.

The Life of Georges Seurat

“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science” was what Seurat said and his development as an artist was a similar progression away from the scenic and emotional, and into the calculated and analyzed.

Important Art by Georges Seurat

Bathers at Asnières

Seurat's first important canvas, the Bathers is his initial attempt at reconciling classicism with modern, quasi-scientific approaches to color and form. It depicts an area on the Seine near Paris, close to the factories of Clichy that one can see in the distance. Seurat's palette is somewhat Impressionist in its brightness, yet his meticulous approach is far removed from that style's love of expressing the momentary. The scene's intermingling of shades also demonstrates Seurat's interest in Eugene Delacroix's handling of shades of a single hue. And the working-class figures that populate this scene mark a sharp contrast with the leisured bourgeois types depicted by artists such as Monet and Renoir in the 1870s.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte

Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte was one of the stand-out works in the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, in 1884, and after it was shown later that year, at the Sociéte des Artistes Indépendents, it encouraged critic Félix Fénéon to invent the name 'Neo-Impressionism.' The picture took Seurat two years to complete and he spent much of this time sketching in the park in preparation. It was to become the most famous picture of the 1880s. Once again, as in Bathers , the scale of the picture is equal to the dimensions and ambition of major Salon pictures. The site - again situated on the Seine in northwest Paris - is also close by. And Seurat's technique was similar, employing tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint that allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. The artist said that his ambition was to "make modern people in their essential traits move about as they do on [ancient Greek] friezes and place them on canvases organized by harmonies." But the classicism of the Bathers is gone from La Grand Jatte ; instead the scene has a busy energy, and, as critics have often noted, some of the figures are depicted at discordant scales. It marked the beginning of a new primitivism in Seurat's work that was inspired in part by popular art.

La Seine à la Grande-Jatte

La Seine à la Grande-Jatte of 1888 shows the artist returning to the site of his most famous painting - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte painted two years prior. This later composition demonstrates Seurat's continued interest in form and perspective, but reveals a much softer and more relaxed technique than La Grande Jatte . The soft atmosphere is made up of a myriad of colored dots that mix optically to mimic the effects of a luminous summer day.

Oil on canvas - Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Young Woman Powdering Herself

Young Woman Powdering Herself is a portrait of Seurat's mistress Madeleine Knobloch. It is an adoring likeness that jokingly contrasts the classical monumentality of the figure against the flimsy Rococo frivolity of the setting. It is also strongly marked by Seurat's increasing interest in caricature and popular art, sources which lent a new expressiveness to his work which accorded with the growing contemporary interest in Symbolism. Knobloch was a working-class woman with whom Seurat maintained a long-term secret relationship, keeping her separate not only from his bourgeois family but also from his bohemian friends. When the painting was shown in 1890, her identity remained concealed. Knobloch was given some of Seurat's paintings as an inheritance but she cut off all communication with his family after his death.

Oil on canvas - The Courtauld Gallery, London

Circus Sideshow

Circus Sideshow is considered one of Seurat's major figure paintings. Yet it is much more condensed than his other mural-size paintings. This was Seurat's first nocturnal painting and it debuted at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. It depicts a ringmaster and musicians under twinkling gaslight who are attracting a crowd of potential ticket buyers. The composition was drawn from on-site sketches he made in the spring of 1887, when Frenand Corvi's traveling circus performed in Paris (it appeared regularly in Paris between the 1870s and the First World War). Though Seurat frequently attended circus-like events in his leisure time, this painting was the first important picture Seurat dedicated to a scene of popular entertainment. The pattern of circles, ovals, and rectangles in the background has attracted much notice from critics, as many of the forms are hard to explain in terms of the structure of the setting. It has been argued that they derive from Seurat's understanding of various contemporary theories of expression, which advocated the use of particular forms and colors to convey particular types of emotion.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seurat's early paintings often feature a remarkable stillness, even with complex figure compositions, but The Circus features a scene of dynamic movement, and is typical of his late style. The scene is borrowed from an anonymous poster for the Nouveau Cirque, printed in 1888, although the horse and bareback rider have been reversed. The figure in the first row of seats, with a silk hat and a lock of hair visible under it, is the painter Charles Angrand, a friend of Seurat's. This painting was Seurat's last, and was left unfinished when he died suddenly in March of 1891. It was sold shortly thereafter to his friend Paul Signac.

Oil on canvas - Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Biography of Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was born in Paris December 2, 1859, the youngest of three children. His father, Chrysostome-Antoine Seurat, was a bailiff; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, came from a prosperous family that had produced several sculptors. Seurat's eccentric father had already retired with a small fortune by the time Seurat was born, and he spent most of his time in Le Raincy, some 12 kilometers from the comfortable family home in Paris. The young Seurat lived with his mother, his brother Émile, and his sister Marie-Berthe.

In 1870 the family temporarily relocated to Fontainebleau, where they stayed during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Paris Commune rebellion. Seurat began to take a serious interest in art as a boy and was encouraged by informal lessons from his maternal uncle, Paul Haumonté, a textile dealer and amateur painter.

Early Training

Seurat's formal training began around 1875, when he entered the local municipal art school under the sculptor Justin Lequien. There, he made a friend of Edmond Aman-Jean (1858-1935) and together they entered the École des Beaux-Arts run by Henri Lehmann, a disciple of the Neo-Classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres .

Seurat attended the Academy from February 1878 until November 1879. The curriculum placed particular emphasis on drawing and composition, and most of Seurat's time was spent sketching from plaster casts and live models.

Seurat spent his free time conducting his own artistic studies and frequently visited museums and libraries throughout Paris. He also sought instruction from the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , whose specialty was large-scale classical, allegorical scenes. Seurat's sketches dating to 1874 include copies of Holbein's drawings, a sketch of Nicolas Poussin's hand from the acclaimed self-portrait in the Louvre, and figures from drawings by Raphael .

Charles Blanc's The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867) and Michel-Eugène Chevreul's The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839) introduced Seurat to color theories and the science of optics that became central to his thinking and practice as a painter. Chevreul's discovery that by juxtaposing complementary colors one could produce the impression of another color became one of the bases for Seurat's Divisionist technique.

In April 1879, Seurat visited the Fourth Impressionist exhibition. This was the first time he had seen their paintings and the work of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro , artists liberated from the rigidities of academic rules, greatly influenced his later experimentation. But in November his military service started in Brest, where he devoted all his spare time to reading and filling sketchbooks with studies of fellow recruits, seascapes, and street scenes.

In the following years, Seurat extended his understanding of color theory and the effects of color on the human eye. He also studied the brushwork of Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and read Ogden N. Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879), which proposed that artists should experiment with color contrast by juxtaposing small colored dots to see how they are blended by the eye.

Mature Period

Seurat began to apply his theoretical research to compositions executed between 1881 and 1884, culminating in his first major painting project, the Bathers at Asnières (1884). This monumental canvas depicted a group of workers relaxing by the Seine and was based on numerous small oil sketches and figure studies. The final composition is an accomplished rendition of the light and atmosphere of high summer. It is largely rendered in a criss-cross brushstroke technique known as balayé and was later re-touched by Seurat with dots of contrasting color in certain areas.

Seurat submitted Bathers to the state-sponsored Salon in 1883, but the jury rejected it. Subsequently, Seurat and several other artists founded the Société des Artistes Indépendants, enabling him to exhibit Bathers in June of 1884. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac who was greatly influenced by Seurat's techniques.

After the Bathers Seurat began work on Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte , a mural-sized painting that took him two years to complete. Many times the artist visited La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine located in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, making drawings and more than thirty oil sketches to prepare for the final work. In the winter of 1885-86 he reworked the painting in the technique that he called "chromo-luminarism", also known as Divisionism or Pointillism. This technique uses dots of contrasting color that, when viewed at a distance, interact to create a luminous, shimmering effect. He also repainted sections of the Bathers in the same style around 1887.

Seurat exhibited La Grande Jatte at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in May 1886. Its visual effects of light and color, as well as its complex representation of different social classes established Seurat as the leader of a new avant-garde .

Late Period

The exhibition of La Grande Jatte in 1886 unexpectedly aroused interest in Seurat's work internationally. Soon after the exhibition, Seurat was mentioned in an avant-garde review and some of his paintings were shown by the renowned art dealer Paul Durant-Ruel in both Paris and New York City.

During this time he began associating with a very enclosed group of Symbolist artists and writers based in Paris. His new associations troubled his friends Pissarro and Signac, who believed he was forsaking the pure study of color and light in favor of idealized subjects. Seurat's last major works depict Paris nightlife and all share a similar muted palette that differs greatly from the vibrancy of his earlier paintings.

Apart from a brief period of renewed military service in summer 1887, Seurat spent his summers on the Normandy coast, painting seaside scenes of Honfleur in 1886, Port-en-Bessin in 1888, Le Crotoy in 1889 and Gravelines in 1890. In winter he finished these paintings and produced large figure compositions. Although executed in his Pointillist style, the dots tended to be finer and more spaced out, giving the paintings a more spontaneous appearance.

In 1889, Seurat traveled to Belgium, where he exhibited at the Salon des Vingt (XX) in Brussels. After returning from this trip, he met Madeleine Knobloch, a 20-year-old model, and started secretly living with her. Knobloch gave birth to a son in February 1890, unbeknownst to his friends and family.

At his exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants the same year, Seurat showed his only known portrait of Madeleine Knobloch: Young Woman Powdering Herself .

Madeleine Knobloch was pregnant again at the beginning of 1891, while Seurat was at work painting The Circus . This painting would remain unfinished. On March 26, Seurat fell suddenly ill with a fever and died three days later. His son died of a similar illness in 2 weeks, and was buried alongside Seurat at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

The Legacy of Georges Seurat

Seurat was only 31 when he died, yet he left behind an influential body of work, comprising seven monumental paintings, hundreds of drawings and sketches, and around 40 smaller-scale paintings and sketches. Although his oeuvre is relatively small in quantity, it had a lasting impact. He was among the first artists to make a systematic and devoted use of color theory, and his technical innovations influenced many of his peers. When the term Neo-Impressionism was coined by art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886, it was to describe Seurat, Signac, and Pissarro's new style of painting and their rejection of the spontaneity of Impressionism.

Poised between Impressionism in the 19 th century, and Fauvism and Cubism in the early-20 th , Neo-Impressionism brought with it a new awareness of the surface qualities of painting, and of decorative effects, thereby contributing to the development of abstraction.

Seurat is often cited by artists with an interest in the visual effects of color, form, and light. Painter Bridget Riley has credited him with influencing her particular brand of Op art .

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Georges Seurat

• Seurat: A Biography By John Rewald
• Georges Seurat, 1859-1891: The Master of Pointillism (Basic Art) By Hajo Duchting
• Seurat (World of Art) Our Pick By John Russell
• Georges Seurat (Rizzoli Art Series) By Norma Broude
• Seurat and the Making of 'La Grande Jatte' Our Pick By Robert L. Herbert, Neil Harris
• Georges Seurat 1859-1891 By Robert L. Herbert
• Georges Seurat: The Drawings Our Pick By Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff, and Richard Thomson
• Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision By Michelle Foa
• Masters of Art: Seurat Our Pick By Pierre Courthion
• Seurat's Circus Sideshow By Richard Thomson
• Ways of Pointillism: Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh By Klaus Albrecht Schröder
• The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat By Martin Kemp
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (thematic section) Our Pick
• Art Institute of Chicago (interpretative resources)
• Georges Seurat: The Complete Works
• Seurat, Drawing His Way to the Grande Jatte By Roberta Smith / The New York Times / October 26, 2007
• How Seurat Worked Up To Sunday Our Pick By Holland Carter / The New York Times / August 20, 2004
• The Death of Georges Seurat: Neo-Impressionism and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in 1891 Our Pick By Marnin Young / Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art / 2012
• The Story Behind Seurat’s Pointillist Masterpiece, ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ By Kelly Richman-Abdou / MyModernMet / July 21, 2019
• The Story behind Great Paintings: Georges Seurat, Sunday on the Grande Jatte - Art History School Our Pick
• Seurat: Courtauld's Impressionists - National Gallery
• Seurat Biography from Goodbye-Art Academy - PhilInTheCircle Our Pick
• Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - Smarthistory Our Pick
• Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
• Art Talk on Georges Seurat’s Models - Barnes Foundation
• Georges Seurat: Point Counterpoint A historical/biographical film on Seurat and his study of Pointillism
• Sunday in the Park with George - 1984 Our Pick Musical by Steven Sondheim / Inspired by the life of the artist

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Alexandra Duncan

Articles and Features

A Legacy of Dots and Daubs Georges Seurat: The Post-Impressionist Artist Who Pioneered Pointillism

By Alice Godwin

The French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat is credited as the inventor of an extraordinary new manner of painting, which left art lovers (literally) seeing spots. Seurat’s dots of pure paint captured life in nineteenth-century France, from ladies strolling along the banks of the River Seine to performers on the gaslight stages of Paris. Seurat conjured these shimmering fabrics of color using a technique that was dubbed “Pointillism,” so called for its touches or “points” of paint, like atomic particles, which reflected a radical new way of seeing the world.

But who was the man behind the spots?

Georges Seurat: Biography

Georges Pierre Seurat was born in 1859 to a prosperous family in Paris, at a time when the architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann was reshaping the city along the frontiers of grand new boulevards. Shy and intelligent, Seurat trained at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin and the École des Beaux-Arts, and spent his formative years copying the casts of classical sculptures and Old Master artworks in the Musée du Louvre. Seurat spent his military service in Brest sketching the beaches, boats, and sea, before setting up a studio near to the Moulin Rouge upon his return to Paris.

Though Seurat’s life was cut tragically short at the age of thirty-one, his influence on western art history has been profound. Ardent followers of Seurat have included Camille Pissarro , Théo van Rysselberghe , Hippolyte Petitjean, Henri-Edmond Cross , and his most notable disciple, Paul Signac. Even in the world of contemporary art, artists like Chuck Close have paid homage to Georges Seurat.

Seurat’s magnificent Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) (1888) broke records for the artist when it was sold at Christie’s New York in November 2022 as part of the estate of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, for just over $149.2 million (including fees).

Neo-Impressionism

It was the art critic Félix Fénéon who coined the term “Neo-Impressionism” to describe a new artistic movement led by Seurat. In contrast to the spontaneity of Impressionism and the fleeting effects of light and color over haystacks and water lilies that had captivated Claude Monet , Seurat developed an analytical style, which viewed color as a mathematical problem to solve.

Seurat harnessed the broad brushstrokes and radiant palette of the Impressionists, but did not paint in one fell swoop outdoors. Rather, he relied upon careful planning and studies of his subject. Seurat’s practice was indebted to the scientific writings of chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and physicist Ogden Rood. He was particularly fascinated by their thoughts on color theory, and the suggestion that pure pigments when placed alongside one another could possess a greater intensity than when they are mixed together.

Seurat’s artworks were also deeply influenced by classical art, inspired perhaps by his academic training. He explained: “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those [classical] friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.”

Pointillism

The term “ Pointillism ” was initially used by critics to poke fun at Seurat’s systematic use of color. Seurat himself referred to his tapestry of contrasting and harmonious hues as “Divisionism.” Seen from a distance, these spots vibrate and dissolve into one another to conjure luminous forms.

Artworks by Georges Seurat

Though Seurat is chiefly remembered for his Pointillist paintings, he was also a master draughtsman. Here is a breakdown of some of Seurat’s most celebrated artworks.

Iconic Paintings

During his brief, yet sensational career, Seurat created seven large-scale paintings, which he referred to as his “canvases of combat.”

Bathers at Asnières (1884)

Seurat’s first major painting was Bathers at Asnières , now in the collection of The National Gallery in London. In this miraculous work, a veil of heat and bright sunshine hangs over a scene of leisure by the River Seine. A young man, with his bowler hat, clothes, and boots discarded, lowers his feet into the cool water, while others lie lethargically on the grass. They are remarkably still, as if too hot to move. The smoking chimneys in the background suggest that these are the workers of a local factory taking their break.

Seurat pictures the working and middle classes at play on the same dramatic scale as the mythological and historical subjects on the walls of the Louvre. Painted when he was not yet twenty-five, Bathers at Asnières shook the foundations of the establishment and was refused by the Salon. Instead, the painting was shown at the rival Salon des Indépendants, established by Seurat and a handful of other avant-garde figures of modern art at the time.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (1884/86)

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, in The Art Institute of Chicago, is often viewed as a counterpoint to the Bathers at Asnières — the upper classes on La Grande Jatte facing the workers in the suburb of Asnières on the opposite side of the river. Paul Signac described A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as a “manifesto painting,” as it epitomized Seurat’s Pointillist technique. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, Seurat depicts corseted women with their parasols and gentlemen with top hats and canes enjoying their leisure time. Curiously, Seurat later added a border of spots around the painting to form a barrier between the picture and its frame, like a lens.

Signac once famously said that Seurat’s artworks on paper were “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence.” In many ways, Seurat’s drawings in conté crayon, on the textured surface of Michallet paper, offer an insight into his exploration of light and dark, of volume and space, through translucent veils and velvety layers of black. They reveal the changing world of Paris at the turn of the century and the process behind some of Seurat’s greatest masterpieces.

Relevant sources to learn more

More from Artland Magazine Read about Post-Impressionism Learn about Pointillism Read about other Post-Impressionist artists Vincent van Gogh Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Other relevant sources Discover available artworks for sale by Georges Seurat on Artland

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Man in a boat

Georges seurat circa 1884, the courtauld institute of art london, united kingdom.

This quick depiction of a boatman belongs to a group of studies that Georges Seurat made along the banks of the Seine on the outskirts of Paris . In these sketches, he experimented freely with different types of brush marks, uses of colour and levels of finish. Particularly striking here are the thick white brushstrokes used to create highlights on the bank of the river and the surface of the water. They confer great luminosity to the composition.

• Title: Man in a boat
• Creator: Georges Seurat
• Creator Lifespan: 1859–1891
• Date Created: circa 1884
• Physical Dimensions: 24 x 17.6 cm
• Type: Painting
• Rights: Photo Ⓒ The Courtauld
• External Link: Explore The Courtauld's collection
• Medium: Oil paint on panel
• Art Movement: Pointillism

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Georges Seurat, The Seine seen from La Grande Jatte

The island of La Grande Jatte and the views from it across the river Seine were a rich source of pictorial subjects for Seurat during the 1880s. He was especially attracted to this location, in part because of the pictorial forms and structures it offered, such as the horizontal of the river and its embankments which were countered by vertical trees and sailboats.

This study was very likely painted on site and formed the basis for a larger painting of 1888, The Seine from La Grande Jatte (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels). Seurat used a board covered by dense white priming that enhances the brilliance of the paint, which he applied using a loose version of pointillism (a technique of painting in small dots of pure colour). He initially placed a large white-sailed yacht to the left of the picture, but changed his mind and painted over it. The ghostly trace of its sails is still visible.

In the spring of 1888 Seurat, accompanied by his friend and fellow artist Charles Angrand, returned to the site shown in his monumental painting of 1884, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (The Art Institute of Chicago). Both the island itself and the views from it across the river Seine were a rich source of pictorial subjects for Seurat, and he produced over 100 small oil sketches of the area. He was clearly drawn to the location, in part because of the forms and structures it offered. The horizontals of the river, its banks and the skyline combined with the verticals of trees, sails and occasional standing figures provided a ready-made grid for his compositions, within which he could arrange particular motifs.

This study, which was first owned by Angrand, formed the basis for a larger painting of 1888 The Seine from La Grande Jatte (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels). It was very likely painted outdoors. We see in it the characteristic key components that appear in many of Seurat’s sketches, notably the horizontal formed by the distant river edge and embankment that runs across the full width of the picture, which is countered by the vertical tree trunk to the far right. Seurat has offset these by including the diagonal of the near riverbank, the green triangle of which cuts into what would otherwise be an almost unbroken band of blue water. He has also included a second tree trunk, the curved shape of which echoes the slight leftward lean of the sailboat.

Seurat initially placed a large white-sailed yacht to the left of the picture, but then changed his mind and painted over it. The ghostly trace of the original is still visible. He also painted over the base of the tree. In the final painting, however, Seurat reinstated the yacht in the middle distance and introduced a single rower on a skiff. He also made the lower tree trunk much more solid and extended the area of land in the foreground.

Most of Seurat’s small oil studies were painted on bare wooden panels, with the natural colour of the wood often visible beneath the brushstrokes. This panel, however, was first covered by a dense white primer, which gives the picture a distinct luminosity and enhances the brilliance of the colours. While Seurat’s earlier sketches were more Impressionist in technique – for example, The Morning Walk – here he has used a loose version of pointillism in which, with the exception of the sails, the paint is laid down in almost identically sized dabs of unmixed colour. A line of dots of blue and orange – themselves complementary colours – can just be seen along the upper edge of the picture. Although they do not continue around all four edges, these are the beginning of the coloured border that appears in the final painting. As with the changed position of the yacht, they are evidence of Seurat trying out ideas as he painted.

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Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"

Georges Seurat French

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 825

This is Seurat’s final study for his monumental painting of Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine (Art Institute of Chicago). Contrasting pigments are woven together with small, patchy brushstrokes, whereas in the mural-sized park scene—which debuted two years later at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition—Seurat used tighter, dot-like dabs of paint, a technique which came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word point , or dot). He preferred the term Divisionism—the principle of separating color into small touches placed side-by-side and meant to blend in the eye of the viewer.

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#6342. Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"

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Artwork Details

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Title: Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"

Artist: Georges Seurat (French, Paris 1859–1891 Paris)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 27 3/4 x 41 in. (70.5 x 104.1 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951

Accession Number: 51.112.6

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On the gogh: what's new in the nineteenth-century european paintings galleries.

Assistant Curator Alison Hokanson introduces a bevy of temporary loans on view in August in the nineteenth-century European Paintings galleries, as well as the first installation of all sixteen of the European Paintings department's Van Gogh paintings in several years.

Seeds of Impressionism: Public Parks, Private Gardens with Author Colta Ives

Publishing and Marketing Assistant Rachel High sits down with curator emerita Colta Ives to discuss the transformation of Paris during the nineteenth century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks.

Me, My Selfie, and I: A Day at the Met with Telly Leung

Actor Telly Leung, known for his work on Glee and star of the upcoming Broadway production of Allegiance , takes visitors on a tour of his favorite works of art in the Museum as he gains inspiration for his performance at the Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month Celebration on May 22.

Timeline of Art History

Georges seurat (1859-1891) and neo-impressionism, post-impressionism, france, 1800-1900 a.d., museum publications.

The New Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 8, Modern Europe

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 26, no. 3 (November, 1967)

Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence

Masterpieces of Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800–1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georges Seurat, 1859–1891

French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before 1865: A Summary Catalogue

Art = Discovering Infinite Connections in Art History

"Impressionists in the Metropolitan"

Related artworks.

• All Related Artworks
• In the same gallery
• By Georges Seurat
• European Paintings
• From Europe
• From France
• From A.D. 1800–1900

Foal (Le Poulain) [also called "The Colt"]

Architectural Motif: Double Acanthus Fleuron

Architectural Motifs: Four Rinceaux

Edmond-francois aman-jean.

Sidewalk Show (Une Parade)

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European Paintings at The Met