<a href="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/800px-A_Sunday_on_La_Grande_Jatte_Georges_Seurat_1884.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2376" src="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/800px-A_Sunday_on_La_Grande_Jatte_Georges_Seurat_1884-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" /></a>
<p style="text-align: center;">(<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/A_Sunday_on_La_Grande_Jatte%2C_Georges_Seurat%2C_1884.jpg">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/A_Sunday_on_La_Grande_Jatte%2C_Georges_Seurat%2C_1884.jpg</a>)</p>
Georges Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) should be preserved for perfecting the technique of pointillism. Over two years in the making, Seurat worked painstakingly on this project by combining small dots of color creating a single hue of color. It can be considered the forerunner for images that are processed on the Web by combining “pixels” to create many shades of color. The painting depicts different social classes in the park on the Island. They include prostitutes, members of the bourgeois class, and middle class both young and old. It is so simple, yet it was a groundbreaking of optical illusion.<!--more-->

At the time Seurat was working on his painting, the Postimpressionist movement was taking place. Many of the artists in that period were tired of Impressionist works and were looking forward to “increas[ing] emphasis to color and compositional form.” Most of the artists at that time were not taking requests from patrons or members of a higher class; they were making their own decisions on what they want to produce. Artists such as Seurat were working on “pictorial illusions.” In his painting, those little points create the illusion of one color but it disrupts the illusion when you would come closer and see what you would see on a television: a bunch of colored dots.

One painting that gives a strange pictorial illusion is Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise.” The painting gives us a simple portrait of a sunrise, yet Monet plays with color and luminesces with the sun which appears to be bright. It has been said if you change the format of the painting from color to black and white, the sun would disappear as if it was not there. It is almost like with Seurat’s painting where you change any aspect from observing the painting, it would ruin the illusion.

Seurat first introduced his painting in the 8th Impressionist exhibition in May 1886. Renoir and Monet certainly felt competitive when they first saw this completely different work. After that, it has been mostly hidden from the public since Seurat died five years later at the age of 31. But then in 1924, Frederic Clay Bartlett purchased the painting and brought it over to the Art Institute of Chicago where it hangs to this day. Today, art lovers and regulars are fascinated by the painting. Every day local residents and travelers flock over to see it. Most people from the 1980s would recognize its cameo in John Hughes’ “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986) in which Cameron (Alan Ruck) finds himself staring at the little girl and his mother in the painting, revealing nothing more than dots the closer we get to the painting and his face.

In my opinion, this painting was really absorbing to me because of its technique and the thought of the painstakingly hard work Seurat had to go through. Like with most people probably, I heard of this painting through “Ferris Bueller.” But then, I got an incredible opportunity to see the painting in the Art Institute during a trip to Chicago with my family. It was a great experience, seeing all of the art in the building especially the one I am proposing right now.

The next generations to come should be fully aware of how this was an important part of the Neoclassicism movement. It really created an illusion that makes us think we are looking at a simple Impressionist painting but it is something different the closer you are to it. Like I said, it predates digital images wherein “pixels” are combined to create many colors. Seurat has worked the impossible, and created a masterpiece with a style that was almost perfect, but in the future computers have perfected creating clean images with combined pixels, but that’s another account.
<p align="center">Works Cited</p>
Fiero, Gloria K. The Humanistic Tradition. 6<sup>th</sup> ed.
<blockquote>New York: McGraw Hill. 2011. Print.</blockquote>
Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte. N.a. Web. 12 December 2011.
<blockquote>&lt;http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/seurat/seurat_themes.html&gt;</blockquote>
&nbsp;