A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884
Georges Seurat
Oil on canvas · 207.5 x 308.1 cm
A riverbank of Parisians built dot by dot from pure points of colour.
Seurat spent two years building this riverside scene from millions of tiny dots of pure colour — a technique he called divisionism. Parisians stroll, sit and fish in still, statuesque calm. Up close it dissolves into specks; step back and it snaps into luminous order.
What you're looking at
Look at the outermost edge: Seurat painted a border of dots directly onto the canvas in 1889, years after finishing it, so that the picture would meet its frame in his own colours rather than someone else's gilt. The scene is stranger than its reputation — a woman on the right walks a monkey on a lead, another fishes, and nobody looks at anybody. The colours have shifted since: the zinc yellow he used has darkened toward olive-brown, so the lawn was painted brighter than the one you see.
On a Frame TV
About 3:2, so the clean crop takes a modest trim top and bottom and holds the composition. Worth a large panel — at any distance the dots merge into flat colour, and the point of the technique only survives if the screen is big enough to stand close to.
Art Institute of Chicago · Visit it in Chicago →
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
More like this
Other works in the collection, starting with Georges Seurat.
