A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, eighteen eighty four, by Georges Seurat. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, in Gallery 240, and the number on its label is 1926.224. It is one of the paintings the whole museum is built around, so it is not hard to find. There is usually a crowd in front of it, which is fitting, because the painting is a crowd.

Start with what it shows, because it could not be simpler. A park on an island in the Seine, just outside Paris, on a bright Sunday afternoon. People of every class stand and sit and stroll in the sun, a top hat here, a nursemaid there, a soldier, a woman fishing, a little girl in white. A pug. A monkey on a leash. Nobody is doing anything. That is the subject. Ordinary people, resting, in the light.

Now walk up close, as close as the guard will let you, and watch it fall apart. There are no lines. There are no solid shapes. Everything, the grass, the water, the dresses, the shadows, is built from tiny separate dots of pure color, thousands upon thousands of them, laid down side by side and never mixed on the palette. Up close it is confetti. It is noise.

Then back away, slowly, and watch it come together. At a distance your own eye does the mixing. A dot of blue beside a dot of yellow becomes green, not on the canvas but inside you, and the green Seurat gets this way glows in a way that green squeezed from a tube never does. He had read the new science of how the eye sees color, and he painted by it, on purpose, dot by patient dot. He called the method by a grand name. Everyone else just calls it pointillism.

It took him two years. Think about that standing in front of it. Two years of dots for one Sunday afternoon, a young man in his mid twenties bent over this enormous canvas, more than six feet tall and ten feet wide, placing points of paint one at a time. When it was first shown in Paris people laughed. They called it bedlam. They did not know what they were looking at, because nobody had ever looked at anything quite like it.

Notice how still everyone is. The figures stand in profile, stiff, spaced apart, almost like figures on an Egyptian frieze. There is warmth here but also a strange, held silence, a whole society caught in amber. Some people find it calm and some find it lonely, and both are right, and Seurat is not going to tell you which.

He died only a few years later, barely thirty one, and left a small handful of paintings, this the greatest of them. So do the thing it is built for. Stand near, and see the dots. Stand back, and see the Sunday. Then step forward and back once more, just to watch it happen.