Van Gogh's A Sunday On La Grande Jatte

Post-Impressionist painters were fond of using color to portray certain emotions in their works. They spent more time on their paintings to try to keep lasting impressions of their subjects, rather than being speedy in order to replicate fleeting scenes onto their canvases. A lot of times, dark, cool colors are made to show darker emotions, and light, warm colors are added where happy emotions radiate out in a painting. Contrast in colors was also used to help distinguish different feelings between parts of each painting. Van Gogh was one of the most popular painters to use color to show his feelings; he went for contrast and bolder strokes that were charged with emotional energy. In his famous piece, Starry Night, he used the blues to show the cold, winter winds of France while the fierce brushstrokes of the sky contrasted with the rest of the calmer parts of the painting that were more in harmony
He liked to put small dots of colors near each other, thinking they would blend when observed farther away to make “true mixtures of colored light.” This theory of his didn't quite work out as well as he thought, but it really depended on the viewer. Like most others, he used warm colors to show a cheerful tone, and cool colors to show sadness. In his piece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, each person in different light shows the emotions the colors correspond with. In the foreground of the painting, the figures are in the shade, with blue-green tones, and are all shown in a more melancholic state. Meanwhile, in the middle ground there are figures in the sunlight, bathing in brighter, yellow-orange colors. These figures appeared to be more active and happy, for example, the girl running in the park. Seurat liked to contrast his colors and this was apparent in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, for one, with the obvious differences of lighting between the foreground, middle ground, and background parts of the