La Grande Jatte

La Grande Jatte is an icon, one of the art world's most recognizable images, coming from a paint - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 , which is magnum opus of Georges Seurat.

Georges Seurat is French and born in 1859. At the eighth annual and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, Seurat first showed A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 at age 26.

In scale, technique, and composition A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 appeared as a scandalous eruption within Impressionism, a deliberate challenge to its first practitioners, such as Renoir and Monet.

The exhibition Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte” seeks to examine a familiar picture afresh and consider why it has so captured the public imagination. By situating La Grande Jatte in the context of Seurat's artistic development, his dialogue with the Impressionists, and the many preparatory studies produced over the two years of its creation, we can arrive at a richer appreciation of its unforgettable appeal—the way it holds in exquisite balance tradition and innovation, a sense of the momentary and of timelessness, wit and solemnity.

It immediately changed the course of vanguard painting, initiating a new direction that was baptized "Neoimpressionism."

He created other ambitious canvases, but La Grande Jatte has remained his definitive achievement.

Although the picture was only rarely seen in the three decades following his death in 1891, its visibility was dramatically increased in 1924, when Frederic Clay Bartlett purchased the picture and placed it on loan at the Art Institute. It has hung there ever since.