Sunday On La Grande Jatte By Georges Seurat

Influenced by the Impressionists’ experimentation with color, Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat worked with innovative techniques. On a huge canvas, the artist portrayed city residents congregated at a park on La Grande Jatte, (literally translates as "the big platter"), an island in the River Seine. It took Seurat more than two years to complete this piece. This complex masterpiece of Pointillism began in 1884 with a series of almost 60 sketches Seurat made during his many visits to the Paris park. Using newly discovered color palettes that were composed of the usual pigments of his time, such as cobalt blue, emerald green and vermilion, Seurat rendered his subject by placing tiny, accurate brushstrokes of different colors close to one another so that they blend at a distance —a process that would not be completed until the spring of 1886. Art critics eventually named this technique Divisionism, or Pointillism. But unfortunately its colors have changed. Seurat used this new pigment in his painting, a zinc chromate yellow that he hoped would properly capture the highlights of the park's green grasses. But for years this pigment has been going through a chemical reaction that began turning it brown even during Seurat’s lifetime.
It’s bigger than most people think it is. It measures in at 81.7inches by 121.25 inches, or about 7 feet by 10 feet. Its large size makes every inch of the canvas covered with tiny dots of color look more astonishing. In1889 the painting was revised. Seurat re-stretched its canvas to allow for room to paint a border made up of red, orange and blue dots. Seurat became the father of Pointillism and of Neo-Impressionism creating the new style with this painting, which was first of its kind. However, he preferred to call his technique "chromo-luminarism," a term that better stressed its focus on color and