Georges Seurat’s, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

Seurat understood and loved the use of shapes and patterns, but he took these basic ideas and pushed them to the next level. His new scientific style that he created himself known as pointillism proved to be a very unusual and affective way of painting. Pointillism is the use of painting with dots of color rather than using brush strokes. Each dot is used side by side to enable the viewer’s eye blend the colors together optically. The amazing thing about Seurat is that he painted it when he was twenty-five years old, already having his scientific the

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte got its name to fame from the use of color, especially complementary colors with Seurates pointillism process. Seurate tried to harmonize his complementary colors rather than create a sense of tension with them. What most artist of Seurates time would say amounts to fanaticism, he painted the whole canvas with tiny dots or points of pure color. Seurates strongly believed that if you put complements side by side, such as oranges and blues in dark areas, the colors intensity would be greatly enhanced. Seurates pointillism did have a slight flaw to it though. It was completely opposite of Monet’s works. The closer you were to the painting the better it looked, the farther you were away, the more murky brown in color it appeared. It is said that the optimum viewing distance for this work is six feet away. (2, p.127)

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte still uses basic artistic methods to give the work a sense of depth and movement. The work uses linear perspective to give us an idea of what is important and who is interacting with whom in the painting. Most of the implied lines of the painting start at the people’s eyes and work there way towards the lake. There are other implied lines in the painting that still start from the eyes of people, but are directed towards other people. The little girl next to the lady with the red umbrella in the center of the picture implied line of sight seems to be right at you. The vanishing point of the painti

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