La Grande Jatte Analysis

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a large painting by Georges Seurat, depicts an afternoon landscape of a park with bourgeoisie picnickers watching sailboats. Seurat spent two years to finish it by using an innovative method inspired by scientific discoveries regarding color theory and optical effect, Pointillism. He contrasted and combined tiny dots of color that through optical unification. Individual dots, when seen collectively together, formed a single color or hue in the viewer’s eyes.

The neo-impressionistic technique makes the color of the painting reveals a real sense of Parisian 's outside on a sunny day and a real strong sense of sunlight streaming through the trees. The viewers can quickly feel the warmth and temperature when they look at the vibrantly portrayed artwork. Pointillism makes the picture”alive” as well as it provides a three-dimensional feel to the viewers.

Seurat didn 't just use the typical opposition of dark and light to enhance the colors and to depict lighting and shading but also by juxtaposing complementary colors. The detail of contrasting shading and brightness of the grass is an excellent example of Seurat’s use of complementary colors. The lighted and shaded area has a dark green color in common. But the bright section further exists of a lighter green and yellow. Meanwhile, all the shaded area exists of red and blue. In the wheel of color, the used yellow and green are analogous but complementary to the blue and red. Another beautiful example can be found in the woman holding a parasol. Her skirt exists of pink and orange yet it casts a blue