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HISTORY
Georges Seurat's "Afternoon On The Island of La Grande Jatte"
One of the greatest masterpieces of the French "Belle Epoque" era.
By Will Street
Jul. 25, 2019, 11:30 AM
Introduction
Georges Seurat was born in Paris, France, on the 2nd December 1859. He was born into a reasonably wealthy family owing to his father, who had become wealthy by speculating on property in France. Surrounding the young child as he grew up the mid 19th Century was a “Belle Epoque” across France when the wars of Napoleon no longer tainted the country, wealth and trade were developing unbound, and there was plenitude of artists and craftsmen furnishing the society they all lived in.
While Seurat was still a young child, in the 1860s, an artistic movement emerged, named “Impressionism”, that showcased small and thin, but visible brushstrokes. This went in direct opposition to the classical principles of the Academy that had dominated the art of the avant-garde for centuries previously. Early artists of this movement included Monet and Renoir, who were later joined by further artists Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne.
However, coming of age in the late 1870s, Seurat would adopt a form of painting, called “Neo-Impressionism”. This went further than Impressionism and utilised brush strokes that were more pointillist and visible. Critiquing the society he lived in, Seurat used his occupation to discredit elements of his society both through content and artistic form. Below, I look at arguably his most famous work, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886).
"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1884-1886)
By 1884, Seurat had already produced a highly revered painting, titled Bathers At Asnieres. This was created at the beginning of Seurat’s shift to pointillism. With fellow artists including Paul Signac, he subsequently created a new society to further the use of pointillism. Fully adopting this style, his next painting would be characterised by this, encapsulated in his famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886).
Principally in his work, Seurat depicts the bourgeoisie as mundane and characterless figures. The distinctive rigid positions and expressionless faces of the bourgeoisie are, as was interpreted by contemporary reviewers, “a subtle parody of the banality of and pretensions of contemporary leisure.” There is a figure in the left middle background, a wet nurse, with no face but made up of an irregular quadrangle intersected by a triangular wedge and capped by two circles, the ribbon identifying it at least as a wet nurse. Seurat has reduced the wet nurse to a minimal function serving no nurturing role. She is thus dehumanized and only marked out by the stock appearance of her trade.
Comparing La Grande Jatte with The Bathers (1884), also illustrates Seurat’s intentions further. In The Bathers, he depicts members of the working class bathing in the same river Seine and adopts a paler colour palette and curvilinear forms that gives the characters a more revered and numismatic impression.
Further, within La Grande Jatte, Seurat questions social identity and social classes. There is a woman in the lower left hand corner with her fan laid down surrounded by two men. Seurat depicts one of the men surrounding her as a calicot who was a stock character from the contemporary discourse on social mobility. The other man is a canotier, which would equally provoke questions about the veracity of social guises. It is, in effect, a call to end social classes.
Imbedded further in the form itself is an anarchist call for equality. Within the Neo-Impressionist technique is a harmony in a moral sense as reflected in the harmony of the pointillist dots. The harmonious form of dots, itself, equally abided to Chevreul’s theory of colours that been established in the 19th Century.
Legacy
Seurat shortly died after his year of painting, passing away in 1891 at the age of 31. As an advancement on the Impressionists, Seurat’s painting was the climax of Belle Epoque impressionist painting. Later painters would, in fact, depart from his technique, such as the Cubist and Futurists of the early 20th Century.