Two years, and the dots

This is not a picture anyone painted in an afternoon. Seurat worked on it for roughly two years (from May 1884 to March 1885, then again from October 1885 to May 1886), and that was after a long campaign of preparation. He made dozens of preparatory studies: small oil panels the French called croquetons, painted out on the island, and conté-crayon drawings (conté is a hard, greasy chalk-and-graphite stick, good for soft dense shading), plus a near-full-size painted study (now at the Met in New York). The huge final canvas was built slowly on top of all that groundwork.

Now the famous part, and it needs care. The surface is built from countless small dots and short strokes of pure, unmixed color, placed side by side. The idea is that the colors mix not on the palette but in the viewer’s eye: put a dot of blue next to a dot of yellow and, from across the room, the eye fuses them into a shimmering green that is more alive than any green you could premix. This is optical mixing, and it is the whole engine of the painting.

Two words get used for this, and they are not the same thing, so it is worth getting right. Pointillism names the visible technique (the dots, the facture, the literal business of dotting paint on). Divisionism names the underlying principle: dividing each color into its separate components and letting them recombine in the eye. Seurat himself preferred “Divisionism” for what he was doing, because he cared about the method, not the dots for their own sake; “Pointillism” was a label others pinned on, at first half-mockingly. The Grande Jatte is the founding monument of both terms, and of the movement they belong to, Neo-Impressionism, the name the critics would soon give this whole new scientific school of painting (the next-but-one chapter tells exactly who coined it and when).

One more making-detail, because it surprises people. A few years after the main canvas, around 1888–89, Seurat went back and added a border of painted dots all the way around the image itself, to control how the picture met the wall. That dotted border is part of the artwork, framed in turn by a plain white wooden frame, and the Art Institute still displays it exactly that way. The painting, in other words, includes its own painted edge.