The long summer of Georges Seurat
If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.
There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”
It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.
That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.
After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!
Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions. See the rest.
