A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - Georges Seurat - Socks

Georges Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is a leading example of pointillist technique. It is a founding work of the Neo-Impressionist movement.

In his largest painting, Georges Seurat depicts people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. Their stillness is as enigmatic as it is fascinating.

Highly criticized and ridiculed when first exhibited in Paris, this painting is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work. With scientific precision, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single and, in his opinion, more brilliantly luminous hue.

Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist artist whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colors became known as Pointillism. In a departure from intuitive Impressionism, he developed a structured, more monumental art to depict modern urban life, thus altering the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-Impressionism.