A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

George Seurat was born in 1859 to a middle-class family with enough money to study at École des Beaux-Artes.  His teachers were Henri Lehmann and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.  He studied with them for a year and a half, but then he left for a year of military service and when he returned, he took up art on his own.  He began painting with black and white and it was soon clear that his talent was blossoming when he began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jette.

Seurat began A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jette in 1884 and completed the work in 1886.  He did 28 drawings, 28 panels, and 3 large canvases before he completed it.  He made fifty different studies of the painting before its completion. The painting is set on the Seine, but it is not near any of the island's shops and there are no factories across the water, because Seurat thought they took away from the social feeling of the painting.  There are young and old people, couples, families, and single people, and people dressed well and those dressed comfortably.  The couple on the right side for example, are dressed beautifully, but they can also be viewed in a comedic sense because they are over displaying themselves.

Seurat developed the technique known as Pointillism in which small points of color were group close together so that they blended into forms when people viewed them from a distance.  This technique matched with his belief that not mixing colors would produce more brilliant colors in the final work.  In his many studies of this painting, his strokes became less and less harsh so that by the time he arrived at the final work, his strokes were in the form of points of color.   

This can be seen below, where the bottom and earlier painting has harsher strokes than the top and final painting.

This technique most drastically separated this painting Post-Impressionism from the style of Impressionism.

This painting ushered in a new direction for art known as Neo-Impressionism.  When the painting was first shown at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 it was seen as a direct challenge to Impressionism.  The only similarity between La Grand Jette and Impressionism was the setting of the people by the river.  Unlike Impressionism, the canvas for this painting was extremely large.  There was also a lack of motion in the figures in the painting.  There is one small girl in red running.  Although they do not move, the figures all fit into small groups and there is order to the painting.  Despite their groupings, however, it is difficult to truly tell which social classes they fit into.

History of Painting:http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/post-impressionism
  Information in the video not mentioned before:
The figures in the painting are bourgeois upper-middle class.  Seurat painted them with Greek classicism in mind which was radical for the time.  He was pointing to the stoic and artificial nature of the bourgeoisie at  the time.  He was part of the bourgeoisie and was therefore pointing out the haughty aloofness of his own class.  The figures in the painting face in four directions; forward, profile left or right, and away.