The Form, Content, and Function of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”

Claude Monet painted about matters of modern life. Pierre-Auguste Renoir also painted the subjects of everyday existence. But Georges Seurat embraced the topics of simple everyday modern life and he went far beyond those simple concerns. He wanted to capture the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. He was beyond his time. He was painting the things that captures take pictures of today. {problem sentence] Many people takes pictures using their smart phones and post them to the Social Media App Instagram every day, but they probably didn’t know that the filters and lenses they use are trained to capture light and bend it in different ways to highlight different shades and colors of the photograph.

Seurat had a great respect for ancient art from societies of the past. He would recall certain elements of them in his art works. He would evoke their ideas in his artwork. He would try to create permanence by incorporating those timeless elements in his own art work. He especially liked Egyptian art and Greek Sculpture. He also liked Italian Renaissance frescoes.

Georges Seurat made final additions to the “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” in 1889. He wanted to add a painted border of color. He re-stretched his canvas so that he could add a painted border of red, orange, and blue dots. It was a good way to have a visual difference between the inside of the painting and the white frame that was specifically made for his painting.

Georges Seurat was only 26 when he displayed this painting at the Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Money and Renoir felt much challenged by Seurat’s talent. The scale of the painting was grand. The technique and composition were spectacular and unique. “A Sunday on La Grande J...

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...ing class suburb of Asnieres.

For Seurat, Impressionists were more led by a textbook approach, which involved many preparatory studies, and deliberate processes. Seurat liked spontaneity, which was characteristic of his neoimpressionism. In the Bathing Place painting, the men are shown looking across the Seine to the Island of La Grande Jatte, which simply looked like a bunch of green shrubbery in the distance, but it actually was a foreshadowing of his greatest work on record, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -1884”.

Seurat wasn’t the only artist to receive inspiration from that place. Claude Monet also painted many paintings there in 1878, which included his own “Springtime on La Grande Jatte”. Seurat saw Monet’s works are received much inspiration in 1879 and painted his own work. He painted The Seine at Courbevoie, which is a town on the opposite shore.