A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
1884-86
Oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago

Studious, solitary, painstaking Georges Seurat died at the age of 31, overworked and largely unacknowledged.  His professional life did not last much longer than seven years, and in that time he sold two pictures.  Thus, as someone has pointed out, he was twice as successful commercially as Van Gogh, who sold only one.  Fortunately, his family had means, and he did not have to depend on his painting for his livelihood, for his method of work involved untiring labor and patience.  Seurat was that seeming contradiction in art, a methodical visionary.  His researches in the theory of color were extensive, and he apparently thought of his pictures as demonstrations of the painting method he had evolved.  But beyond his mechanics there was a feeling for paint, and beyond that his tireless effort to realize a formal structure with its own interior harmony.  He took from the impressionists their freshness of color, but like his fellow "post impressionists" – Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin; – he went beyond surface appearance to inner reality.  "Art", he said, "is harmony" and the art of the painter lies in the "space hollowed out" in the canvas.  In other words, the picture frame contains not merely a window giving on nature, but a definite area in which the artist creates the order or essence or rhythm behind the show of appearance.  Sunday on the Island of la Grande Jatte, which may be seen in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago, reveals very clearly the combination of the artist's personal technique and those impersonal qualities of formal composition that make his best works a rare aesthetic experience.

Edwin Seaver

Gray Weather, Grand Jatte
1888
Oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 34"
signed bottom left
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Walter H. Annenberg Collection

By his own description, Seurat set out to discipline the creation of paintings through the systematic application of carefully calculated formulas concerning color, composition, and line, which superseded those works of the older generation of Impressionists.  During the second half of the 1880s he laid a foundation for a new, objective mission for the many artists of his own generation who were drawn to his methods.  Yet, for all the rigor of intention and application of his theories, the outcome always seemed to comprise a balance of systematic application and poetic expression.  Thus duality is no more apparent than in the vigorously analytical yet subtly evocative painting Gray Weather, Grande Jatte.

This picture shows a dull, overcast summer's day on the Grande Jatte, devoid of the rowers, boaters, and fun seekers who populate the 1886 painting, which contains some forty figures.  The idle boats are tied up to the mooring posts driven into the shallows along the bank:  a little sailboat on the far left; two punts with pennants (perhaps from their rowing clubs) fluttering from the mooring poles; and a steam-powered craft firmly secured between two other poles, its dinghy tied up separately.  As large as the latter boat seems in this context, it is probably just a small pleasure craft of the kind that moves gaily downriver in the 1886 painting, its guide sail, which goes up over the metal arch on the stern, furled away.

The view across the gently flowing river to the suburb of Courbevoie behind a concrete embankment is framed by the trees of the island.  A path worn on the grass moves strongly across the foreground, the boldness of its diagonal somewhat dissipated as it weaves in and through the little grove of trees on the left.  The surface of the painting is densely, but not evenly covered by a series of small brush strokes applied with great deliberation.  Directly placed pure colors alternate within each area of definition:  orange/green, blue/yellow, and white/gray.  A border of alternating strokes of red and blue surrounds the entire canvas.  The effect is at once freshly panoramic and spatially flattened.  As Robert Goldwater noted, the diagonal placement of the tree trunks is balanced by the visual union of the foliage to the surface of the picture plane, just as the strong angle of the path is spatially thwarted by the even horizon of the bank beyond.

It is unusual for Seurat, who was very prudent about his titles, to have given a descriptive title to this painting: "Gray Weather." At least three of his harbor pictures bear the notation `Evening' along with the name of the town in which they were painted, but never was he as specific in noting the climatic nature of the moment as he was here. In this he was drawing close to the intention – at least in title – of the Impressionists, particularly Monet, whose declared purpose was to capture specific climatic effects. Given Seurat's relationship to the older generation of Impressionists and his supposed dependency on their attitudes and style – a link that has been seriously questioned in recent criticism – this is an idea worth testing. Is this, indeed, a closely witnessed record of a temporal and climatic condition in nature?

Felix Feneon, the critic and friend of Seurat, was among the first to note that one of the grave dangers of Divisionist painting was that through its increasing refinement of the applied, separate stroke that characterize its practice, the interaction of colors tended to cancel one another out, creating a somewhat dulled coloristic effect that may have been just the opposite from the vibrancy intended. That is certainly not the case here, where despite the intensity and degree of density of color strokes, the relationship is so refined and delicately balanced that the overall muted effect is as intended. This phenomenon proved a danger only for those followers of Seurat who practiced his Divisionist techniques with less rigor and strongmindedness. The subtlety and degree of forethought exercised here argue for a completely calculated effect, an effect that is described by the title. The strokes, for example, are not applied with an even denseness. They vary markedly in their thickness and degree of color contrast from one zone of the picture to another, just as the priming layer is not applied evenly but, rather, with considerable forethought to align with the bands of pattern within the picture: the lighter path, the water, and the sky are painted directly on unprimed canvas, whereas a white underpainting shows in spaces between the strokes in darker areas, to further enhance the contrasted color strokes and create illusionist space. The final effect is one of great formal lucidity and absoluteness, yet it has a definite sense of the place and the atmosphere in which it was witnessed. The subjective element is in enchanting accord with the objective calculations of its realization; the "scientific" and the "poetic" duality is resolved on the highest possible aesthetic and experimental plane.

The border is painted, allowing the picture to distance itself from its original wooden frame, taking the shadow of the frame away from the image with an aura of gentle vitality. The painted border has been frequently discussed and its originality questioned on the assumption that Seurat returned to this picture at some later date to adjust its surround, as he was known to have done in other cases. However, careful observation of the edge of the picture suggests that this is not the case. The image of the landscape is carefully brought up to a fine edge of exposed, ungrounded canvas well within the perimeter of the outer edge of the canvas. This dark razor line is particularly evident in the highlight of the tree trunk to the right, which plays so effectively in and out of the third dimension, in contrast to the dark border just beyond--with the blue and red alterations applied on the same exposed canvas with great method.

Le Chahut
1889-90
Oil on canvas, 66 1/8 x 55 1/2"
Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo

A frenzied gesticulation suddenly invades Seurat's art in the final two years of his life. Seurat studied and collected Jules Cheret's posters, and their compositional form is felt in Le Chahut. The curled mustache repeated in the dancer's turned-up lips, the decorations and ribbons on the dancers' shoulders and shoes, the strange similarity of male and female legs, everything here expresses the taste for peculiar detail.

This exuberance, however, does not conceal the extreme rigor of the composition. Seurat inscribes his network of diagonals on a regular geometrical background. A figure in the foreground stabilizes the composition, as one does in The Circus. Between background and foreground breaks occur. Seurat arranges in the intermediary space of Le Chahut a series of arc-shaped curves created by the dancers legs. "Monsieur Seurat'' wrote Felix Feneon in 1889, "knows very well that a line, independent of its representational role, has an appraisable abstract value.''

Le Port de Gravelines
1890
Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 36 1/2"
Signed, bottom right; The Indianapolis Museum of Art
Gift in Memory of Daniel W. and Elizabeth C. Marmon

This is a canvas that presents in one compact vision the air of the harbor and of the sea. An impression of stability is supplied by the bollards along the sea wall casting their shadows in the direction of the channel. The rest is infinity, the infinity of a perspective in an elegant parabola, seemingly a prelude to the immensity of the sea, here perfectly calm and inducing to calm. The free, full, modulated space which cuts the painting in two gives off utter serenity: the lighthouse, the boats at anchor, and the harbor cut across by one sweeping diagonal to provide the contrasting movement.

This painting is luminous, flooded with light and sunshine, rather high in color; it contrasts with the evening effect of the channel scene in the William A. M. Burden collection. As Lucie Cousturier observed of Seurat, "he could sit in front of any bench, tree, or wall which others had previously depicted, and his own vision would not be influenced one particle."

The canvas was exhibited at the Exposition des XX in Brussels, and at the Independants of 1891 with The Circus. There exists one study for it on a panel which was owned by Maximillien Luce.

After the outdoor light of La Grande Jatte and the studio light of The Models, here is an artificial light; the gas and acetylene lamps create the mood of traveling fairs.

This work shows to what extent Seurat was concerned with construction. It is clear here how deeply Seurat had been impressed by David Sutter's observations on the architectonics of classical works of art. The canvas analyzes itself, as it were. It would be pedantic nowadays to trace the counterpoint of verticals and horizontals, clear-cut rectangles and blurred ovals, the whole broken by a few slanting lines (the branches of the tree, the ringmaster's riding crop, the railing of the staircase behind the trombone player at the center).

This is perhaps the sole work of nineteenth-century painting that unequivocally anticipates Cubism (and even Purism). It heralds the coming of a new school, which, from 1908 on, was to revolutionize form no less profoundly than Seurat revolutionized the treatment of color.

Seurat here is at his coldest and most austere. It would seem that the balance of La Grande Jatte and The Models has given way to excessive deliberateness. We may say that like certain works of Poussin, The Side Show is a painting which has been wholly thought out in advance.

The face of the ringmaster (or perhaps animal trainer), with the same haircut and mustache twisted to turn up, will reappear in Le Chahut, where the riding crop is replaced by the conductor's baton.