Lot Essay
Of the numerous works which Seurat executed over the course of his short career, Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte (fig. 1) is perhaps the best known. Exhibited at the VIIIe Exposition de Peintures Impressionnistes in 1886 and in the IIe Salon des Artistes Indépendants the following year, this early masterpiece attracted considerable notoriety in its day and in ours, becoming the subject of a Broadway musical a number of years ago. Seurat worked on the painting between 1884 and 1886, making numerous oil sketches d'après nature in the mornings and devoting the afternoons to developing the composition of the enormous canvas (81½ x 121¼ inches) in his studio. In this way, Seurat significantly modified, but did not entirely break with, the plein-air practices of the Impressionists.
It is likely that Femmes au bord de l'eau constitutes one of Seurat's preparatory studies for this great painting. John Rewald has proposed that the sketch may in fact be an independent work related to a series of seascapes that the artist painted in Honfleur in 1886 (H. Dorra and J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 186); and de Hauke suggests that it may also be related to La Seine à Courbevoie of 1884-1885 (fig. 2), although the presence of the village in the background of preparatory sketches for this painting speaks otherwise (de Hauke, op. cit., p. 72). Stylistic and physical evidence, however, suggests that Femmes au bord de l'eau belongs with the studies for La Grande Jatte. A small work on panel measuring 6 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches, it corresponds in size to the other esquisses. More importantly, various elements of its composition point to Seurat's painting of 1884-1886: the high horizon line, the layering of light and shadow along the painting's diagonal axis of the painting in the form of triangles which progressively decrease in size, and the horizontal and vertical structure created by the embankment across the Seine and the trees on La Grande Jatte itself. Still, the fact that the configuration of trees in Femmes au bord de l'eau differs from that in other preparatory studies (e.g. de Hauke, no. 125; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) for La Grande Jatte (which more closely conform to the distribution of flora and fauna in the final painting) makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive attribution, although formal analysis points in the direction of the Chicago picture.
Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte has been variously interpreted in relation to modern social history and to Seurat's celebrated color theory. Robert Herbert, among others, has noted that the painting is an amalgam of popular and high art sources, carefully adjusted to the subject matter of petit-bourgeois families parading outdoors, dressed in their Sunday best. The stiffness of the figures, which is already evident in the preparatory sketches, may be an ironic commentary on the artifice adopted by the lower classes in their attempt to ape the social conduct of the haute-bourgeoisie. At the same time, Herbert suggests that there may be a more utopian message in Seurat's limited cross-section of modern leisure:
Upon close inspection the apparent diversity of Seurat's society
falls away to reveal a rather narrow band of the social spectrum, mostly lower-middle and middling bourgeois, with perhaps some
artisans. The Impressionists had represented a broader range...
By eliminating such diversity Seurat created in La Grande
Jatte a harmonic middle-class society, an ideal of peaceful
leisure signaled by the Sunday of the painting's title.
Fénéon, Seurat's foremost interpreter, gave a succinct
description of this contemporary Cythera: "The subject: the island beneath a scorching sky, at four o'clock, boats slipping along its flanks, stirring with a fortuitous Sunday population enjoying
fresh air among the trees." (R. Herbert, "Un dimanche à la
Grande Jatte, 1884-1886," Seurat, New York, 1991, p. 178)
Félix Fénéon was an ardent defender of the Neo-Impressionist creed, as Paul Signac's 1890 homage to the critic reminds us (fig. 3). In a letter to Fénéon dated June 20, 1890, Seurat insisted on his position as the initiator of Neo-Impressionism and the divided brushstroke. Carefully documenting his investigation of advanced color theory, Seurat indicated his familiarity with the writings of Charles Blanc, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter. To this list may be added the name of Charles Henry, who is not specifically mentioned in this letter but whose ideas nonetheless exercised a considerable influence on Seurat's theories of form and color.
Much has been written about Seurat's quasi-scientific objectivity in exploring the effects of light and color. Fénéon himself wrote in 1886:
If you consider a few square inches of uniform tone in Monsieur
Seurat's Grande Jatte, you will find on each inch of its
surface, in a whirling host of tiny spots, all the elements which make up the tone. Take this grass plot in the shadow: most of the strokes render the local value of the grass; others, orange tinted and thinly scattered, express the scarcely felt action of the sun; bits of purple introduce the complement to green; a cyanic blue,
provoked by the proximity of a plot of grass in the sunlight,
accumulates its siftings toward the line of demarcation, and
beyond that point progressively rarefies them. Only two elements come together to produce the grass in the sun: green and orange
tinted light, any interaction being impossible under the furious
beating of the sun's rays. (F. Fénéon, "Les Impressionnistes en 1886," La Vogue, June 13-20, 1886, pp. 261-275; quoted in
N. Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, 1978, pp. 36-38)
Yet it is important to understand that Seurat's divisionist technique, in which small areas of contrasting color are juxtaposed to suggest the intensity and chromatic richness of light as it falls on objects, is anything but systematic. Indeed, Seurat constantly adjusted his optical theories to the exigencies of painting itself, using sharp contrasts of light and dark along a tonal register to establish a degree of luminosity that he could not achieve through contrasts of complementary colors alone.
(fig. 1) Georges Seurat, Un dimanche à La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886 The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Georges Seurat, La Seine à Courbevoie, 1884-1885
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Paul Signac, Portrait de Felix Fénéon, 1890
Private Collection
It is likely that Femmes au bord de l'eau constitutes one of Seurat's preparatory studies for this great painting. John Rewald has proposed that the sketch may in fact be an independent work related to a series of seascapes that the artist painted in Honfleur in 1886 (H. Dorra and J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 186); and de Hauke suggests that it may also be related to La Seine à Courbevoie of 1884-1885 (fig. 2), although the presence of the village in the background of preparatory sketches for this painting speaks otherwise (de Hauke, op. cit., p. 72). Stylistic and physical evidence, however, suggests that Femmes au bord de l'eau belongs with the studies for La Grande Jatte. A small work on panel measuring 6 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches, it corresponds in size to the other esquisses. More importantly, various elements of its composition point to Seurat's painting of 1884-1886: the high horizon line, the layering of light and shadow along the painting's diagonal axis of the painting in the form of triangles which progressively decrease in size, and the horizontal and vertical structure created by the embankment across the Seine and the trees on La Grande Jatte itself. Still, the fact that the configuration of trees in Femmes au bord de l'eau differs from that in other preparatory studies (e.g. de Hauke, no. 125; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) for La Grande Jatte (which more closely conform to the distribution of flora and fauna in the final painting) makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive attribution, although formal analysis points in the direction of the Chicago picture.
Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte has been variously interpreted in relation to modern social history and to Seurat's celebrated color theory. Robert Herbert, among others, has noted that the painting is an amalgam of popular and high art sources, carefully adjusted to the subject matter of petit-bourgeois families parading outdoors, dressed in their Sunday best. The stiffness of the figures, which is already evident in the preparatory sketches, may be an ironic commentary on the artifice adopted by the lower classes in their attempt to ape the social conduct of the haute-bourgeoisie. At the same time, Herbert suggests that there may be a more utopian message in Seurat's limited cross-section of modern leisure:
Upon close inspection the apparent diversity of Seurat's society
falls away to reveal a rather narrow band of the social spectrum, mostly lower-middle and middling bourgeois, with perhaps some
artisans. The Impressionists had represented a broader range...
By eliminating such diversity Seurat created in La Grande
Jatte a harmonic middle-class society, an ideal of peaceful
leisure signaled by the Sunday of the painting's title.
Fénéon, Seurat's foremost interpreter, gave a succinct
description of this contemporary Cythera: "The subject: the island beneath a scorching sky, at four o'clock, boats slipping along its flanks, stirring with a fortuitous Sunday population enjoying
fresh air among the trees." (R. Herbert, "Un dimanche à la
Grande Jatte, 1884-1886," Seurat, New York, 1991, p. 178)
Félix Fénéon was an ardent defender of the Neo-Impressionist creed, as Paul Signac's 1890 homage to the critic reminds us (fig. 3). In a letter to Fénéon dated June 20, 1890, Seurat insisted on his position as the initiator of Neo-Impressionism and the divided brushstroke. Carefully documenting his investigation of advanced color theory, Seurat indicated his familiarity with the writings of Charles Blanc, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter. To this list may be added the name of Charles Henry, who is not specifically mentioned in this letter but whose ideas nonetheless exercised a considerable influence on Seurat's theories of form and color.
Much has been written about Seurat's quasi-scientific objectivity in exploring the effects of light and color. Fénéon himself wrote in 1886:
If you consider a few square inches of uniform tone in Monsieur
Seurat's Grande Jatte, you will find on each inch of its
surface, in a whirling host of tiny spots, all the elements which make up the tone. Take this grass plot in the shadow: most of the strokes render the local value of the grass; others, orange tinted and thinly scattered, express the scarcely felt action of the sun; bits of purple introduce the complement to green; a cyanic blue,
provoked by the proximity of a plot of grass in the sunlight,
accumulates its siftings toward the line of demarcation, and
beyond that point progressively rarefies them. Only two elements come together to produce the grass in the sun: green and orange
tinted light, any interaction being impossible under the furious
beating of the sun's rays. (F. Fénéon, "Les Impressionnistes en 1886," La Vogue, June 13-20, 1886, pp. 261-275; quoted in
N. Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, 1978, pp. 36-38)
Yet it is important to understand that Seurat's divisionist technique, in which small areas of contrasting color are juxtaposed to suggest the intensity and chromatic richness of light as it falls on objects, is anything but systematic. Indeed, Seurat constantly adjusted his optical theories to the exigencies of painting itself, using sharp contrasts of light and dark along a tonal register to establish a degree of luminosity that he could not achieve through contrasts of complementary colors alone.
(fig. 1) Georges Seurat, Un dimanche à La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886 The Art Institute, Chicago
(fig. 2) Georges Seurat, La Seine à Courbevoie, 1884-1885
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Paul Signac, Portrait de Felix Fénéon, 1890
Private Collection