George Seurat and hi painting

A detailed Summary of George Seurat and hi painting

Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.

The famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was painted between 1885-1886. The subject is an island newly adopted by the Parisian middle class as a place for quiet Sunday gatherings. The painting looks very realistic. The figures and the way they are dressed look lifelike as does the beautiful landscape in the background. The colors and the painting style, pointillism, make this painting very realistic. The question is, h

Once the landscape was finally fixed Seurat had great difficulty filling it with people. This was more important in the painting than the depth or surface pattern. He wanted to create a magical atmosphere that the artist was able to create from the abstract patterns of contemporary bourgeois Parisians. Seurat's figures are like ones of a mystery and of isolation one from another. However, he was meticulous with them in trying to make them as lifelike as possible. In several drawings Seurat worked at details of the fashionable woman's costume. Having drawn many drawings, he tried to make them more lifelike as the drawings went on. Each of the drawings is different in their own way. For example in a preliminary drawing, a couple is shown and a women is wearing a skirt with no frills. In the previous drawings, there were frills in that dress. Seurat constantly changes the drawings to make them appear realistic. In the last of the preliminary drawings (The New York Study) all the figures appear to be in places where they will later be painted. Some figures appear for the first time: the man standing behind the old couple with a horn, the little girl skipping along in a red dress and above all the two men in the left extreme foreground . The canotier half lying in the grass in the foreground, leaning on one elbow and holding a pipe in his other hand, still wears a straw hat and not a jockey cap, and the man sitting behind him in black clothes wears a felt hat, which will be replaced by a top hat. The monkey is still its original size; but the little funny dog jumping all around in not yet in the picture.

ow does Seurat go about making the painting look so lifelike?

Seurat used earth colors in many of his previous works, prior to La Grande Jatte. Seurat used burnt sienna and light ochre in his previous painting entitled, Une Baignade. However, during his first phrase of work on La Grande Jatte, he abandoned only the ochre, not the burnt sienna. Seurat seemed to have given up these pigments quite gradually, just as increasingly renounced underpainting, ulimately allowing the white canvus to show through between the dots of color.

Pointillism was a major reason in why Seurats painting looks so lifelike. During the painting of La Grande Jatte, Seurat simplified his brushwork to such an extent that his painting seems to be composed of nothing but tiny, more or less circular dots. Seurat's experiments with color led him to paint in small dots of co

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Approximate Word count = 1675
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People