Seurat

A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86)

In his largest, most famous painting Seurat depicted a typical Sunday in a park on the banks of the Seine in a Parisian suburb. He spent two years working on this canvas and drew hundreds of preparatory sketches. The result became an icon of late-19th-century painting characterised by the technique of Pointillism, whereby coloured planes consist of countless, tiny dots of pure, generally complementary colours. Seurat developed this ‘divisionist’ method on the basis of existing, semi-scientific colour theories. His work no longer reflects the search for the spontaneous light of nature such as that of Monet or Renoir, but is a testament to the belief in timeless art in the tradition of Classical Antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.