A science to replace Impressionism

The Impressionists painted fast. They stood in front of a thing and caught the flicker of light on it before it changed, in loose, quick dabs, trusting the hand and the moment. To a serious young Frenchman in his mid-twenties, that looked less like a method than like luck, and he set out to replace the luck with a rule. He was Georges Seurat(1859–1891), one of the Post-Impressionists (the generation that came after the Impressionists and tried, each in their own way, to put structure and rigor back into the bright, loose painting they had inherited). Seurat’s version of “putting it back” was the most systematic anyone around him attempted: he wanted painting built on laws, not instinct.

The laws came from real science. He had read the color research of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who had shown that any color looks different depending on what sits beside it (a gray next to red drifts greenish; the same gray next to green drifts reddish), and of the American physicist Ogden Rood, who had worked out that two colors set side by side and mixed in the eye stay brighter than the same two stirred together on a palette, where they only go muddy. Out of those two findings Seurat built his whole technique: never mix the paint, place the pure colors next to each other, and let the viewer’s eye do the blending. He had already tried it at large scale once, in Bathers at Asnières (1884), his first big canvas. The Grande Jatte was to be its monumental companion and the full proof of the system.

For all that theory, the subject was utterly ordinary, and real. La Grande Jatte(“the big bowl,” roughly) is an actual island in the river Seine just west of Paris, a long thin sliver of grass and trees between the suburbs of Neuilly and Levallois. On a hot Sunday it filled up with Parisians of every class let out of the city for the afternoon, the top-hatted and the shop-girl side by side, strolling the shade, lying on the grass, taking a boat out, courting, dozing, fishing off the bank. It was the most unremarkable scene in France: a public park on a day off. Seurat went out to it again and again with small panels and crayons, studying the real light through the real trees and the real bodies arranged across the lawn, and then carried all of it back to the studio to be rebuilt, dot by dot, into something that looks nothing like a snapshot of a lazy afternoon and everything like a cathedral of one.