“The Seine from La Grande Jatte”
“The Seine from La Grande Jatte” is an oil on canvas painting from 1888 by the French artist and father of Pointillism, Georges Seurat. This painting was done in Seurat’s new Pointillism style, which is one of the first Neo-impressionism art styles nascent to modernism.
La Grande Jatte is an island within the Seine River located just outside the Porte de Champerret city gates, which were part of the Thiers wall, northwest of Paris. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, la Grande Jatte part of a much larger industrial site. Over the next fifty years, it was redesigned by Louis Philippe I, the King of France, as a park for him and his family to enjoy.
In the late 1800s, the island was further revamped for public use by Napoléon III and Baron Haussmann as part of an urban renewal program. By the end of the nineteenth century, many artists traveled here from the city to paint. This includes many famous names such as Alfred Sisley, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet.
Georges Seurat used this setting for many of his works, including his most famous painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. Seurat was fond of the overall form the landscape offered, including the horizontal lines of the banks and the river itself, and the vertical lines of the trees. A study for this painting, painted that same year, is in the collections of the National Gallery in London, England.
During this period, Seurat was employing pure colors in his pointillism to evoke emotion. For Seurat, dark and cold colors evoked sadness, an equal balance of light and dark evoked calm, and warm and bright colors evoked happiness.
“The Seine from La Grande Jatte” is currently the collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, Belgium.
For more on Georges Seurat, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
