Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”

This small panel is one of approximately fifty oil sketches and drawings made as preparatory studies for Seurat’s monumental masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte. Painted from 1884–86, the scene depicts Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine. Illustrating Seurat’s process of investigation, the figures in the present panel were significantly transformed in the final painting. Seurat’s style came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word “point,” or “dot”), but he preferred the term divisionism—the principle of separating color into small touches placed side-by-side and meant to blend in the eye of the viewer.