A painting a day · No. 29 of 38
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat (1859–1891)
1884–1886 · Oil on canvas · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The story
Parisians relax on an island in the Seine. Seurat worked on it for two years, building it up from small dots of pure colour that mix in your eye rather than on the palette — pointillism.
Look closer
- Get close and the grass is hundreds of dots of green, yellow and blue.
- The woman on the right has a monkey on a lead.
- A painted border of dots runs around the edge. He added it later.
Did you know
Some of the bright yellow he used has turned brown over time. Scientists in Chicago have shown what the grass first looked like.
Why we can show it
Georges Seurat died in 1891. UK copyright lasts for the artist’s life plus 70 years, so even under today’s rules this painting would have been free for anyone to show since 1962. The photograph is a faithful copy of a flat work, which creates no new copyright. We do not store the picture: it comes from Wikimedia Commons each time it is needed. More on this.