“The Seine from La Grande Jatte”
This oil on canvas piece from 1888, titled “The Seine from La Grande Jatte”, is by the French Post-Impressionism artist and father of Pointillism, Georges Seurat. This painting was done in the Pointillism style which is one of the first Neo-impressionism art styles that was nascent to modernism.
La Grande Jatte is an island within the Seine River located just outside the Paris city gates. In the beginning of the 19th century, la Grande Jatte was an industrial site. In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was redesigned by Louis Philippe I, the King of France, as a park for 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 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 currently on display at 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 on display at 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.
