Oil Sketch for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884"1884
Seurat made dozens of small oil sketches on the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine, working outdoors to study light, colour and the placement of figures for his great painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, in the same collection. More about this work
About this work
Seurat made dozens of small oil sketches on the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine, working outdoors to study light, colour and the placement of figures for his great painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, in the same collection. In this panel the strollers and loungers along the riverbank are only roughly defined by heavy daubs of paint, and the brushwork is loose and varied, quite unlike the systematic dots of the finished canvas. Sketches like this show how carefully he planned the composition before applying his rigorous method.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
Heavy daubs of pigment form a crowded scene of roughly defined, finely dressed individuals in a brightly color park along a riverbank.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Oil on panel
- Oil paint on prepared wooden boards, usually oak in the north and poplar in Italy. The rigid, smooth surface suits fine detail and thin, glowing glazes.
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Georges Seurat
French, 1859–1891 · Born and died in Paris.
Seurat trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and studied the colour theories of Chevreul and others before developing pointillism, building pictures from small, separate touches of pure colour meant to combine in the eye. His large compositions, planned through many drawings and oil sketches, include Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. His black conté crayon drawings are equally distinctive. He died suddenly at thirty-one.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1981.15
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Painting
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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