A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

Two years of work and countless tiny separate dots of pure color, building a frozen Sunday crowd, the founding monument of a whole new science of painting.

1. 1
   The border that is painted, not framed

   The band of dots running all the way around the edge of the image, just inside the white wooden frame

   Around the whole picture runs a border made of painted dots, which Seurat added around 1888–89, a few years after the main canvas. It is not the frame; the plain white wooden frame sits outside it. The dotted border is part of the artwork itself, painted to control the transition from the image to the wall, and the Art Institute still shows it that way.
2. 2
   The woman with a monkey

   Foreground right, the elegant couple, at the woman’s feet on a leash

   A fashionably dressed woman stands at the right holding a leash, and at the end of it is a small pet monkey, the detail most viewers miss entirely. In French a monkey is a singe, and in this era the animal carried a sly pun on female impropriety, so some read the monkey as the picture’s quiet social joke. Treat that reading as interpretation, not fact; the monkey on the leash is simply, verifiably there.
3. 3
   The girl in white at the center

   Near the middle of the canvas, a small brightly lit child in a white dress

   Near the center stands a little girl in white, and she is rendered almost without dots, brightly and smoothly lit, so she becomes the one still, clear point in a canvas built entirely from broken color. She is the optical and compositional focus, the eye’s resting place in the dazzle.
4. 4
   The dots, up close and far back

   Anywhere across the surface, but easiest to test in the broad sunlit lawn

   Stand close and the whole picture dissolves into countless separate dots and short strokes of pure, unmixed color. Step back and they fuse: the grass that looked like a confetti of green, yellow, orange, and blue up close reads as one luminous sunlit lawn from across the room. That fusing-in-the-eye is the entire method and the single best demonstration of why the painting was a break.
5. 5
   A woman seeming to fish

   Left edge, at the waterline, a standing woman holding a rod

   At the left, by the water, a standing woman holds a fishing rod. Some scholars make a pun of it, since the French for “to fish” sounds close to the word for “to sin,” and read her as a hint at the area’s reputation. That is a reading, not a fact; at minimum she anchors the left edge of the composition.
6. 6
   The grass you see is partly faded

   The broad areas of sunlit lawn, where the green is patched with dull brown

   Look for dull brownish patches in what should be brilliant sunlit grass. Those are not Seurat’s intention; he used a zinc yellow pigment that has chemically darkened to brown over the decades, so the lawn was meant to be far brighter and more golden than it now appears. What you are seeing is partly faded, a real conservation fact, not the original effect.