Paintings for our times: Seurat’s Île de la Grande Jatte

Sunday, 22nd March 2020

Well there’s nothing for it, the pubs are closed, the cinemas are closed, the coffee shops are closed – let’s head for the park… and so they do, in their droves. And from Whitstable to the Wrekin, from Southwold to Snowdonia en masse they go - into the wide open spaces for a communal close encounter.

It’s the end of course, it couldn’t last and at 8.30 the following evening they hear their leader’s command:

“From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction - you must stay at home. Because the critical thing we must do is stop the disease spreading between households. That is why people will only be allowed to leave their home for very limited purposes.”

In today’s painting, we have a lingering reminiscence of that last day of freedom, this time in a riverside park in Paris. It’s a late Spring Sunday afternoon in 1884 and the gardens are on Île de la Grande Jatte. This is an island on the River Seine about four miles from the city centre of Paris in the department of Hauts-de-Seine, and shared between the two communes of Neuilly-sur-Seine and Levallois.

The painting is an oil study for a more complex finished work which now hangs in the Art Institute, Chicago (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-6) first publicly exhibited at the 8th and last Impressionist exhibition in May 1886.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, The Art Institute of Chicago

The scene represents, in simplest terms, a group of contemporary Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine. The finished painting earned him instant notoriety, due to its subject, scale (3.5 metres wide), and, especially, the pointilliste technique in which it was painted.

This method of applying small touches of unmixed pigment in optical mixtures of complementary, or similar, colours reflects Seurat’s knowledge of 19th century scientific chromatic theory, although it may also have been influenced by contemporary notions of ideal colour and moral harmony.

The identity of the elegant couple that dominates this sketch has been much disputed. The fact that, in the finished painting, the woman holds a long-tailed monkey on a leash, has led to the suggestion that she represents a prostitute (singesse, in contemporary Parisian slang), perched in the arm of her client. However Seurat’s intention may have been less anecdotal, simply to parody the stiff ‘cant britannique’ and fashionable pretensions of these promenaders, solemnly engaged on a quintessentially bourgeois Sunday afternoon activity.

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak made an interesting observation on the BBC 4 television programme ‘Art Mysteries’ regarding the finished work and another of Seurat’s paintings in which A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte appears in the background.

The painting is called Les Poseuses or The Three Models (1886) and is a study of three nudes in various poses with the Grande Jatte serving as a backdrop.

Les Poseuses, Georges Seurat, painted 1886–1888. In the collection of the Barnes Foundation, Philandelphia (public domain).

Januszczak’s suggestion is that each of the three unclothed models can be identified in the main work.

The model with her back to us sits behind a crumpled blue shirt, a parasol and a straw hat with an orange flourish. Look at the main painting… there she sits, serene with her posy of wild flowers.

Have we seen you somewhere before?

Meanwhile, where is the model we see in profile pulling on her green stockings and beside her, a dark mauve dress, orange parasol and straw hat? Is it the woman in the straw hat and dark mauve dress with a friend and little girl on the far right of the picture?

Detail from Les Poseuses. Could this be the figure in La Grande Jatte, on the right?

It’s certainly possible…

And then we have the central figure who confronts us with an accusatory stare. Does she echo the central female character ostentatiously ‘walking’ a monkey on a lead arm in arm with what might well be her ‘patron’? While the figure in La Grande Jatte is certainly more fuller-figured than the model, there is a facial similarity, even in profile.

All conjecture, I know. However, there is a certainty behind all this. In French the word, poseuses has two meanings – first, it simply means ‘models’. Second, however, it is used a sneering insult to describe self-important people who pretend to be something they’re not. English speakers use the term ‘posers’ in the same way.

It is in this sense that Seurat is using the term to describe the characters in the background painting we see in Les Poseuses. In doing so, he is making a judgement about Paris or of certain sections of Parisian society at least.

The façade of genteelness we see in A Sunday on the Island of la Grande Jatte is stripped naked in Les Poseuses and tells us much about the place of women in this particular section of society.