Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) is one of the most striking pieces at the Art Institute of Chicago (itself one of the most excellent museums in the world).
It’s painted in a style called Pointillism.
If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s made of thousands of little dabs (points) of color. (And this is a big piece, at 80” x 120”.)
Of his work, Seurat wrote, “I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own.”
Seeing this painting especially in Chicago, near the banks of the beautiful Lake Michigan, is special. Though it’s of a completely different place on earth, it captures the mood of “that sort of a place” perfectly.
