A Friday Afternoon with the Island of La Grande Jatte

In a recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago I made it a special effort to view the painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. This specific painting is located at the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, gallery 240. It is a Georges Seurat masterpiece and was created on an oil canvas. The painting illustrates a crowded park, on a hot summer day. There are people looking out into the water, while others lie in the shade of the trees in the green grass, enjoying each other’s company. Several people are holding umbrellas to keep cool from the hot rays of the sun, due to what seems to be a blistering hot day along the water. It seems to me, that all men and women are wearing a hat, except for the children, this marking a time period much earlier than our own. All of the shades in the painting seem to be of the warm color grouping and work well together in the overall painting. Within the collection of paintings in the room, this particular painting grabs the audience attention the most. It is quite large in size, about 7 by 10 feet. When I viewed this painting on Friday around 12:30 pm, there was somewhat of a crowd drawn to it. Georges Seurat created this painting through the use of different elements of form and style. He focused on simplified geometric forms and solid compositions. He used a method called Pointillism. Pointillism is defined as “the theory or practice in art of applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance they blend together”(Courthion). Seurat used miniature dots of different color that are perceived as one color to the human eye. If zoomed in, the audience can see the different color dots next to each other. For example, the grass is made up with colors of orange and blue, but to the human eye the grass looks green (Courthion).