A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884

By the late 1870s and 1880s, a growing number of women were actively engaged in public life; as a result, they wore new styles of clothing appropriate for outings in the city and suburbs. Whether viewing paintings in the Musée du Louvre, singing in a Parisian church, or strolling on the island of La Grande Jatte, they appeared in daytime ensembles that, while often luxurious, tended to be...

~~Beginning in the 1880s, painters introduced color that did not represent visual reality. Turning away from materialism and what they often described as decadent urban society, these painters delved inside themselves for ways to express the values they held dear. Although disassociated from institutional religion, Paul Gauguin and...

~~The centrality that the naturalist aesthetic established in the visual arts in the 1880s and 1890s was in substantial part based on its stylistic flexibility as a means of representation – the descriptive allowing scope for a plurality of touch, tone and surface – and so its ability to embrace a wide range of artistic...

~The generation that followed the Impressionists experienced the Commune and its repression as a childhood trauma and their attempt to achieve a more monumental expression of modernity represents not only a...

When A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884 (Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte—1884) was exhibited by Seurat in 1886 and 1887, it was understood by many critics within two seemingly unrelated interpretive frameworks (fig. 42). A number of critics focused on the artist’s pointillist method of paint application, that is, on...

Technical examination of the paint layer can confirm a work’s age or authenticity and add to knowledge of the painting’s execution and the artist’s intended effects. Examination can address either the materials or the ways they were handled—the techniques. Study of paint materials offers information that is specific but of limited interpretive use to the art historian. Pigment identification can deny (but rarely confirm) a paintings age, or can identify areas of repaint. Precise identification …