The icon, and the fade

Seurat did not live to see the painting become an icon. He died suddenly in 1891, aged just thirty-one, with the Grande Jatte still in his hands, and it passed to his family. The canvas went down through Seurat’s brother, Émile Seurat, who held it and then, in 1900, sold it for about 800 francsto a collector named Léon-Casimir Bru, who bought it on the advice of his daughter, the painter Lucie Cousturier.

Cousturier inherited it, then sold it in 1924 to the Paris gallery of Charles Vildrac, who resold it that same year to the Chicago collectors Frederic Clay Bartlett and Helen Birch Bartlett. In 1926 it entered the Art Institute of Chicago as the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, where it has been a signature work of the museum ever since, with a condition that reportedly keeps it from traveling, so it effectively never leaves.

Today the Grande Jatte is the canonical image of Neo-Impressionism and the dot technique, saturated into popular culture: it anchors a whole Broadway musical (Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George) and turns up in the movies. But the honest closing note is the one about the paint. The lawn you stand in front of is not the lawn Seurat made: that zinc-yellow pigment has darkened to brown, so the brilliant golden-green Sunday he built, dot by dot, over two years, is slowly fading toward something duller. The most scientific painting of its age is, in the end, at the mercy of its own chemistry. What you see is a great monument, and a partly faded one, at the same time.