The archive / Pointillism / A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
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A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat · 1859–1891
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3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. 300 DPI · sRGB · personal-use license.
Museum-quality giclée on Hahnemühle German Etching — heavyweight 310gsm, acid-free, velvety matte. Made to order & shipped.
Sizes in the download
Ready-to-print files at every size below — each drops straight into a standard frame at 300 DPI, nothing cropped:
Each of these also prints big-wall at 150 DPI — up to about 36″ on the short side (so the 36×24″ becomes 54×36″), for a step-back view. Or print the borderless master, the full-resolution scan, sharp to about 18×24″.
The work
A summer afternoon built from millions of dots.
Seurat constructed this vast scene out of countless tiny dots and dashes of complementary colors laid side by side, his Pointillist technique inspired by optical and color theory. Rather than mixing his pigments, he placed separate dabs next to one another so that the viewer's eye would blend them into a single, more brilliant hue. The canvas was preceded by an unusually large body of preparation: more than seventy preliminary oil sketches and drawings in which he worked out the landscape and figures.
Why it matters
The painting that launched a movement.
The work debuted at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886, where Seurat was hailed as the leader of a new movement. That same year the critic Félix Fénéon gave it a name: Neo-Impressionism.
Look closer
He kept reworking it for years.
Around 1888-89 Seurat returned to the finished picture and painted a border of small colored dots around its edge to ease the transition between image and frame. He had reworked the canvas earlier too, amplifying some silhouettes and adding figures such as the famous monkey on a leash. The painting's initial reception was sharply divided, and among the hostile critics J.-K. Huysmans dismissed Seurat's figures as lifeless beneath their speckled surface.
Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of opposites, the analogy of similarities of tone, of tint, of line taking account of a dominant and under the influence of the lighting, in combinations that are gay calm or sad.— Georges Seurat, letter to Maurice Beaubourg, 1890
The file & the facts
- Title
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- Artist
- Georges Seurat
- Year
- 1884–86
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 207.5 × 308.1 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Open access · personal use
- File
- 300 DPI · sRGB · JPEG
