A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1884
Artist	Georges-Pierre Seurat
Year	1884–1886
Type	Oil on canvas
Location	Art Institute of Chicago

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1884 (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte - 1884) is one of Georges Seurat's most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.

Overview

Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (6 ft 10 in x 10 ft 1 in) in size.

Motivated by study in optical and colour theory, Seurat contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer's eye. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a colour degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.

The island of la Grande Jatte (pronounced grhand zhot) is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the suburb of Neuilly, bisected by the Pont-de-Levallois. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. In 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.

Acquisition by The Art Institute of Chicago

In 1923 Frederick Bartlett was appointed trustee of The Art Institute of Chicago, he and his second wife Helen Birch Bartlett loaned their collection of French Post-Impressionist and Modernist art to the Museum. It was his wife Helen who had an interest in French and avant-garde artists and influenced her husband's collecting tastes. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was purchased on the advice of the Art Institute of Chicago's curatorial staff in 1924.

In conceptual artist Don Celender's 1974-5 book Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers and Collectors one of the questions is "How much did The Art Institute of Chicago pay for Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte in 1924?" with the answer given as $24,000.00, although as the painting is currently held in The Art Institute of Chicago's Helen Birch Memorial Collection it is unclear as to whether this question is correct or whether the Institute assisted the Bartletts in their purchase of it.

References in popular media

• Sunday in the Park with George is a 1984 Broadway musical inspired on the painting and concerning a fictionalized Seurat's experiences as he paints his masterpiece. Authors Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine won the the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the production, which starred Mandy Patinkin as Seraut and Bernadette Peters as his mistress, Dot.
• An iconic scene in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off includes the character Cameron Frye staring deeply into the dots of the little girl's face in the painting.
• In an episode of Looney Tunes, Elmer Fudd chases Bugs Bunny through a moving reproduction of the painting.
• In 2006, the scene was re-enacted by citizens of Beloit, Wisconsin and photographed.
• The popular NBC show The Office parodies the painting as the promotional poster for their eighth season.
• In the EA Games' "The Sims 3", it's possible to paint with your own Sim a very similar reproduction.
• In Family Guy where Stewie looks at the little girl in the painting at a museum. This painting is featured in Family Guy episode The "Tan Aquatic with Steve Zissou" as a direct hommage to "Ferris Bueller's Day Off".

Related works by Seurat

• 
  Study for La Grand Jatte, 1884 Zoom
• 
  Figures assises, 1884
• 
  Die Insel La Grande Jatte mit Ausflüglern, 1884
• 
  Paysage et personnages, 1884–1885
• 
  Groupe de personnages, 1884–1885
• 
  Esquisse d'ensemble, 1884–1885
• 
  Femmes au bord de l'eau, 1885–1886
• 
  Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886

External links

• Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte
• http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/27992