Description:
landscape; outdoor; woman; animal; people; vegetation
Label Text:
This small panel is a study for Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his monumental painting--roughly 6 x 10 feet in size--now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Seurat made extensive preliminary drawings and oil studies for many of his larger paintings, a practice he had learned while studying at the traditional Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte is painted in his pointillist style, characterized by small dots of pure color. However, this study, which may have been executed directly in front of the scene, was painted in a looser, more spontaneous manner. La Grande Jatte is an island on the Seine near Neuilly, a suburb of Paris; during Seurat's time it was a fashionable leisure site for picnicking, walking, and boating, as his large painting reveals. This study depicts a stylishly-dressed woman with a parasol walking a pet monkey on a leash. Monkeys were not common pets in Seurat's day, and some critics concluded that the monkey, a traditional symbol of lust, indicated that this woman was a prostitute. However, her dress suggests she is a typical middle-class stroller, and the meaning of the monkey remains ambiguous. In the final painting she is accompanied by a well-dressed man.
Other label: This is one of nearly sixty studies Seurat created for his best-known painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The fashionably dressed woman and her pet monkey took on nearly life-size proportions in the final, monumental painting, where she joined over forty middle-class figures relaxing in a park outside Paris. The monkey would have received attention in a public park, but it would not have been entirely unfamiliar in Parisian society.
In the study, Seurat’s short green and yellow brushstrokes create areas of sunlit and shaded grass. The sketch displays his method of creating form through contrasts and gradation of color.
Seurat’s use of small dots and dashes in the final painting was a style that came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word point, or stitch). La Grande Jatte is considered an icon of Neo-Impressionism (c. 1886–1906), a movement that applied optical theories and science to Impressionism’s experiments with light and color.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1934.2.1 |
