Seurat's Masterpiece: A Sunday on La Grand Jatte - 1884

What makes Georges Seurat's masterpiece 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -1884' so revolutionary? What does the picture mean? And why did it become so famous? Join Alastair and James as they explore the mysteries of one of the most beguiling paintings in the history of art. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte - 1884, 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières 1884, The National Gallery, London Georges Seurat, The Diner, 1883-84, Private Collection Georges Seurat, Embroidery; The Artist's Mother, 1882-83, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Musée du Louvre, Paris Eugène Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1854-61, Saint-Sulpice, Paris Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, c.1869, The National Gallery, London Georges Seurat, Madame Seurat, the Artist's Mother, 1882-83, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Georges Seurat, House at Dusk (La Cité), 1881-82, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Georges Seurat, Aman-Jean (Portrait of Edmond François Aman-Jean), 1882-83, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Georges Seurat, Seated Boy with Straw Hat, study for Bathers at Asnières, 1883-84, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Georges Seurat, Bathers (Study for "Bathers at Asnières"), 1883-84, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. Georges Seurat, Horse and Boats (Study for "Bathers at Asnières"), 1883-84, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. Georges Seurat, Boy from Behind, c.1893, Private Collection Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1880, Kunstmuseum, Basel Georges Seurat, The Couple: Study for La Grande Jatte, 1884, The British Museum, London Georges Seurat, La Grande Jatte, 1884, Private Collection Georges Seurat, Monkey, 1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Georges Seurat, The Channel at Gravelines, Evening, 1890, Museum of Modern Art, New York Recommended Reading: Alastair Sooke, Seurat: Bathers at Asnieres, 2025 Robert Herbert, Seurat: 1859-1891, 1991 Karen Serres, Seurat and the Sea, 2026 ————————— Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I am Alastair Sook.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  In a sun-dappled park on an island in the River Seine, a crowd of Parisians is whiling away a Sunday afternoon. To one side, a woman is fishing, while men sitting nearby on the grass gaze across the water as a butterfly flits by. A little girl runs towards a clump of trees, the trunks of which resemble the columns on a Greek temple. Another, dressed in white, stares back at us, the only figure who does. And to the right of this scene, in the foreground dominating everything, there is an elegantly dressed couple who can be seen in profile. The top-hatted gentleman puffs on his cigar and his companion, dressed in an extravagant bustle, holds a monkey on a leash.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  So that, James, is a rapid, my rapid, sketch of one of the 19th century's most spectacular paintings, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, crucially the year in which it was begun, 1884 is part of the title, by the French artist Georges Seurat. And since 1924, it's hung in the Art Institute of Chicago. And to use a word that's banned by the newspaper for which I write, I think it is truly, it is iconic. I think, I'm sure you would agree. And in part, it's because of the way it's painted, right? With all of these unmixed colours that have been laid down side by side, gazillion dabs, patches, specks, flecks, spots.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  And I think, in fact, that's what, for many people, Seurat is known for. He is the painter of dots, who follows this supposedly scientific method and invented a seemingly impersonal technique known as pointillism. So, look, where do you stand on Seurat's dots, James?

• 1:54Speaker 00

  It's true. If people know anything about Seurat, they know about the dots. But the dots are a tiny part, as it were, of his overall importance. I think that Seurat is one of the giants of modern art. He's one of those great figures of the 1880s, together with Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, who really takes impressionism forward and who, in doing so, builds this bridge between 19th century art and 20th century art. But the really striking thing, actually, about Seurat, Alastair, is how short his career was.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  I mean, he was 31 years old when he died.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  That's, I think, six years younger even than Van Gogh.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  And of course, it prompts the same question as with Van Gogh. What would he have done if he'd had some more years?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I know, there are, I think it's sort of seen as six major canvases. We are going to be talking about in the second half today, the second, which is probably his most famous, the Grande Jatte. You see, I think he still gets a bit of a bad rep because we'll talk a lot about his interest, well, maybe not too much because it's, I think, a little bit boring, but about his interest in colour theory, which perhaps is part of the intellectual explanation for why he does the dots. You see, I think he's got this reputation as being a bit of a cold fish, you know, excessively rational, he's got this method. You know, he always banged on about his method. He said, "People see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method, that's all." And it's almost as though with the dots, you know, you could think of him as like, he's this sort of automaton,

• 3:21Speaker 01

  the AI agent of avant-garde 19th century art.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  He is a very cerebral artist though, isn't he? He's not, he's not a kind of Van Gogh. He is a methodical artist. But I find, he says there's no poetry in his work, I find those paintings immensely poetic and evocative and mysterious and weird. I mean, I think when you look at Seurat's pictures, you often think, oh, lovely landscapes, sea scapes, people relaxing in the sun. They seem almost cosy, but the longer you look at them, the closer you look at them, the weirder they get. I think he's a profoundly strange artist.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  He is. I mean, they are quite eerie. And I actually think what's been interesting in art history generally in recent decades is that that old idea of Seurat, that sort of myth, if you like, of him as being this excessively rational artist who really just does everything by calculation and then doggedly pursues that, that method that I just referred to. It's not totally true. He obviously does proceed by intuition a lot as well. And his creativity is, okay, he isn't an explosive, expansive, expressive Vincent Van Gogh, but his intuition, his creativity is guided by kind of more exciting lights than just simply the colour theory that we may address.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Totally. So shall we get started?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do it. This is the story of Georges Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's get started, Alastair. Georges Seurat is born in Paris in 1859. He's born into a privileged, affluent bourgeois family. His father is a very interesting figure. His father, I think, was some kind of bailiff, but made a small fortune from property speculation.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  And so he retires very early. And in fact, I think he's retired before even Seurat is born.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  He kind of disappears, doesn't he?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Very strange, because what he decides to do with his retirement is he buys this villa in the suburbs and leaves his family and lives there on his own, returning only on Tuesdays for dinner with his family. So very, very strange.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  I think he's a very religious man. I think he builds an altar in the villa and spends a lot of time doing Catholic rituals with his elderly gardener. So it's kind of far show sketch kind of situation.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Is that a euphemism?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Well, possibly. The other unusual thing about Seurat's father, I shouldn't laugh because it's not funny, but the other unusual thing about Seurat's father is he has one arm.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  So he's lost an arm in a hunting accident. And the reason I laugh is because one of Seurat's friends, an artist called Paul Sinyak, came round to the family house, it must have been on a Tuesday because it's the only time his father went, to have dinner with the family. And can I read what Sinyak said?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Please.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  He said, of Seurat's father, "At table, he would screw on to the end of this arm, knives and forks, which allowed him to cut with celerity and even passion, fillets and roasts, fowl and game. He positively juggled with these pointed and sharp-edged arms, and whenever I was seated next to him, I feared for my eyes. Georges paid no attention whatsoever to these vaudeville antics."

• 6:26Speaker 01

  So his dad is Captain Hook?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yes. Or Edward Scissorhands.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Edward Scissorhands. Oh, it's interesting. Seurat's sometimes seen as a predecessor of the surrealists.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And you wonder whether this is the source of it, this primal scene.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Seurat's father is clearly a strange man, a withdrawn man. He's leading a kind of double life. Shall we talk for a brief moment about his son, Georges himself? I mean, we should say, I don't want to reveal too many secrets about this podcast. We never script our conversations, but we do send bullet points to each other. And one of your bullet points, Alastair, is...

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I mean, this is, this is exposing.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Is Georges Seurat a personality?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Do you think he had a personality?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Discuss. He, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because some of the later descriptions of him are slightly damning, and even from his friends. I mean, he clearly was quite reserved, could be quite aloof, quite silent.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Repressed.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Repressed. There's this idea that there's an older impressionist artist, Degas, very famous, of course, who supposedly, according to another friend, in a moment of quote-unquote humour, gave him the nickname Notary, the Notary.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, he sort of exuded accountant vibes, didn't he, Georges Seurat?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  There is this photograph of him, I think maybe only the one. And we don't know who took it or when, but he's there. He has this cravat, interestingly, it has lots of dots on it, you know, which is maybe a little nod to the method that he pioneered. But he does look like, to me, he always reminds me of a sort of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian scribe. There's something of the sort of priestly cast. And I think, again, this plays to this idea that he was, you know, could be a bit sort of boring and overly obsessive in terms of that intellectual content. But on the other hand, he, you know, you haven't mentioned at all his mum. I think he does have at home, it's a sort of female household that he's at the centre of. The dad's away in the suburban villa, his mother probably does encourage his art.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  I wanted to mention, we'll talk later about Seurat's astonishingly beautiful drawings. Why hasn't there been a show of Seurat's drawings in Britain in recent years? There really should be at somewhere like the Courtauld. But there are a pair which depict, one's his dad...

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Edward Scissorhands.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Edward Scissorhands, gobbling at the table. But he seems quite indistinct and quite remote. And there's another drawing of his mum, Ernestine, and it's called Embroidery. And it's clearly modelled on a famous painting by Vermeer in the Louvre. And Seurat, as a young artist, he's going to the Louvre. That's part of where he's getting influences from. And it's much more intimate and gorgeous and suggests a loving relationship.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  So beautiful, isn't it?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I mean, interestingly about the, you've brought up the sort of food theme. Even later in his life, and this is a clue to his slight oddness as a personality, he ends up having this relationship with a working-class woman who becomes his mistress, who has this amazingly Martin Amisian name, you know, of Madeleine Noblock.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Make of that what you will, but I mean, that's, that is her real name. But even when he is living with her, in total secrecy, his friends don't really know about this, most evenings, he's returning to his mother's apartment to have an evening meal with her. So he's a total mummy's boy, essentially.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Shall we talk a little bit about his training? So he's into drawing, Georges Seurat, from an early age. At the age of 15, he goes to the little municipal drawing school round the corner from his home. At the age of eighteen, he enrolls at the École des Beaux-Arts.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Which is one of the most prestigious, it's the most prestigious art school in Paris, which provides a very, very traditional training. So he's doing life drawing, he's copying plaster casts, he's doing perspective, he's doing anatomy. By all accounts, he's not very good.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  No, he's not. I mean, I kind of love this fact because his drawings are actually stunning. And at this point, he really likes the French neoclassical artist Angre.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Who doesn't?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Who doesn't? I mean, one day we will do Angre in this podcast, I'm sure. And his teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts-

• 10:18Speaker 00

  I'll be very angry if we don't.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Just to avoid that pun, we can never do it again. We, when he's at the École des Beaux-Arts, his teacher was a pupil of Angre, actually. And he has a big class. I think Seurat finds this guy's teaching quite stultifying, but he is ranked, in the short time he's at the École des Beaux-Arts, I think forty-seventh out of a class of about seventy?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  No, lower.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Is it lower?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Well, by the end of the summer, he's ranked seventy-third out of eighty.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  So he's really not-

• 10:49Speaker 01

  He's failing.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  He's really failing. But then, in eighteen seventy-nine, Alastair, he sees an exhibition. And this exhibition is a real turning point for him. And this is the fourth Impressionist exhibition. Do we need to talk a little bit about Impressionism? Do you want me to say anything about Impressionism?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Or we could just refer our listeners and viewers to the very first episodes in this series, where we talked about the first of these exhibitions, the Impressionist exhibitions. But it's probably worth a recap.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Okay, well, towards the end of the eighteen sixties and into the early eighteen seventies, a new generation of French artists, people like Monet and Renoir and Pissaro, they begin to make a new kind of art in many ways, to painting modern life, often painting on plein air, outdoors, much more sketchy, spontaneous brushwork. And in eighteen seventy-three, and this is what we discussed in that very first episode eons ago, they actually create their own little exhibition society. And they staged their first exhibition, Alastair, in eighteen seventy-four, which we now call the first Impressionist exhibition. They have subsequent exhibitions through the eighteen seventies. And in the eighteen seventies, really, the Impressionists are, they are the avant-garde, if you like, in France. If

• 11:58Speaker 00

  you're a progressive artist, it's Impressionism that you want to deal with. And so in eighteen seventy-nine, they staged their fourth show, and Seurat goes to see it. My understanding is he had no real understanding of Impressionism before this.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Well, there is a friend who records that his experience at the exhibition was he had an unexpected and profound shock. And there is this sense that suddenly he really is electrified by engaging with, and subsequently will react against, this new progressive avant-garde art that he's encountering in the capital. Because at the end of the same year, eighteen seventy-nine, he goes and does a stint of military service. He goes to Brittany, and we have this rather wonderful sketchbook, which comes from his time in Brittany on military service, where he's sketching lots of the soldiers. It provides quite a lot of evidence of his early interest in these various colour theories that had been put

• 12:57Speaker 01

  about in the nineteenth century, that would influence him so much that we might return to. But at the end of this period of military service, when he comes back to Paris, he doesn't go back to the École des Beaux-Arts. And instead, there's an artist called Amman Jean, who he's met already at art school. And together, they start sharing a studio in a working-class district of Paris. And it becomes clear that Seurat is interested in many different aspects of art history, but Impressionism is one. He's interested in the barbers-on-school of painters, who are slightly earlier, but also loved painting outdoors. They were very interested in naturalism, rural motifs, quite loose brushwork, quite

• 13:41Speaker 01

  exciting. He's fascinated, too, by Angre's great antagonist in French art, Eugene Delacroix, the great romantic French painter, who, he goes with his friends to a particular church in Paris. He sees Delacroix's frescoes there, there's one, for example, called Jacob Wrestling the Angel. And what he seems to be relishing is the fact that Delacroix is placing, he has very vibrating, vibrant brushwork, and he places colours side by side. And so maybe this is a source of that later unmixed colours side by side, the dots, the points, the flecks that Seurat creates in his own art. He's also looking at an artist who was very popular at the time, who had this supposed archaic simplicity, a Frenchman called Pierre Pouvier

• 14:24Speaker 01

  de Chevan. And I never quite got this. I mean, he was important to the avant-garde at this moment, and was seen as offering an alternative to the very classical tradition that the École des Beaux-Arts embodied, if you like. But in a sense, he too seems to be quite classically minded. I think there's something, do you have a sense of why he was so important to them?

• 14:46Speaker 00

  No, he was revered, not just by Seurat, but by many artists in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. And he was, yes, he was a kind of strange individual who was producing these quite, as you say, archaic pictures that, to many progressives, felt extremely modern. But I think the thing to summarise here with Seurat is that after he returns from military service, he goes through, I've mentioned this before, he goes through this kind of laboratory phase. And I think lots of great artists have a laboratory phase in their careers, when they get their heads down, and they really try to work out what kind of artist they are. And of course, it helps if you have independent wealth. And Seurat is from a wealthy family. He is able to spend a couple of years in the early eighteen eighties, just working out what kind of art he wants to make. And the real breakthroughs, I think he makes, you've mentioned this already, are his drawings.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah, they're so beautiful.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Question for you, yes or no answer?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, right, okay.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Is Seurat's drawings better than his paintings?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Ah, they are so good, aren't they?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  They're so good.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  I mean, you can't compare apples and oranges like that, James. They are, I mean, it's worth saying that they are-

• 15:47Speaker 00

  That's not a yes or no answer.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  No, it isn't. I mean, don't do yes or no, I'm far too verbose. The thing with Seurat's drawings is that he starts using a medium called conte crayon. And it's not as crumbly as charcoal. And he creates these drawings on a, typically, there's a company called Michelay that produce this very textured, milky-white, laid paper. And the reason I mention that texture is because he's using the texture as he's applying the conte crayon to create these really tonal, atmospheric, beautifully suggestive, evocative pictures that barely have any line in them at all.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Drawings without lines.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  They're just light and dark, of strange characters he's seeing and encountering in Paris, places in Paris, indeed, his family members. Sometimes supposedly, he draws, I'd never really understood whether this is a myth, by candlelight. But I'm sensing your one-word answer to this question would be a simple yes, the drawings are better than the paintings.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  I think they're among the greatest drawings ever made in the history of art.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  They are, yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  I love the paintings, but the drawings are just life-changing. The most celebrated one is a portrait he makes, someone you've mentioned already, his friend, his childhood friend, actually, Aman Jean. He makes this in eighteen eighty-three. You mentioned the Michelay paper. You can actually see in this drawing, you can see the watermark of Michelay on the left.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  And it's just, to be able to make a drawing that has no lines, and that feels like a totally tonal experience, it's like looking at an old photograph or something, a grainy photograph.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  He often uses this technique called irradiation in drawing, where if you have a sort of light element, say, on a shoulder, he offsets that with some real darkness behind. But then, where the other side of the body would be cast in shadow, you wouldn't expect the background to be different, but then he offsets the dark part of the body with lightness. So it's not naturalistic.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  No.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  But it creates this wonderful atmosphere.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  So good. Anyway, he makes that in eighteen eighty-three. He submits it to the Salon, which is the great state exhibition. And the drawing is accepted by the Salon, it's displayed in the Salon. It's a great breakthrough moment. And I think it gives him the confidence later that year to actually make his first big painting.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Do you know how it was described by an art critic at the time? Because it was picked out at the Salon. The quote is, and it's very flattering, but it's quite minor, "An excellent study in light and dark, a meritorious drawing that cannot be the work of a newcomer." Well, it was the work of a newcomer, but it was also a relative, I mean, it's a substantial, imposing, brilliant drawing, but it is nevertheless a drawing. And as you say, he's on the cusp of creating the first of these six great canvases that structure his career. His first masterpiece, which he wants and will subsequently submit to the Salon, which he probably begins the spring or summer of eighteen eighty-three, and it's finished by eighteen eighty-four. And this is a painting which is now known

• 18:37Speaker 01

  as The Bathers, The Bathers at Anniers.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yes. And he obviously heads into this with characteristic professionalism. He works six days a week. He works from nine till seven. I mean, we call him the notary. Degas called him the notary. But he does it in that kind of way. He's returning home every evening to his mum's house for supper. And he spends quite a lot of time on it. He makes lots of preparatory drawings. He makes preparatory paintings as well, that are called croquettons.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  I love the croqueton.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  The croqueton, I mean, they are very interesting. They're sort of in, on, on plein air. He's painting them probably outside on small pieces of wood, sometimes walnut. And you often see the wood bleeding through. And the point about the croqueton is they're very appealing to modern eyes because they have this fragmentary, basically quite impressionistic brush stroke. They feel very impressionist, but he's using them as studies essentially. And then he's returning to the studio. He creates these really worked up drawings for the motifs that are going to be in his final painting of The Bathers, some of which you know are in the studio because you can see behind the model, an easel. But in the old days, people assumed, here we go, Mr. calculation, Mr. notary. He's going from sketches outside through to studio drawings. And then finally, then he's, he takes on the, um, the composition.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And whilst, yes, there is an arc to that preparation that's clearly very Ecol de Beaux-Arts, very traditional. In fact, he probably is going back and forth a bit. He's going to Annier, which we should probably say is this suburb northwest of Paris, somewhere where the impressionists had painted, but it's changing a lot. You know, we spoke about this in the first impressionist exhibition, um, podcast mini series that we did, but Paris is booming. It's Baron Haussmann time. It's an expanding city. The population, I think, doubles between, what, the 1850s and the 1870s, from maybe something like one million to two. And, uh, you have this bourgeois middle class that are going out of, out of the city, often on the train, in the background of Bathers at Asniers, you can see a railway train going

• 20:31Speaker 01

  along a railway bridge and they're going to places like Annier where they could do things like picnic, fish, boat around, if that's a verb. And the thing about Annier is it's changing. And this is where I think Seurat is quite interesting because it's becoming, since the impressionists had really been there, increasingly industrial. And in the final painting, you see factory chimneys in the background. So we'll describe it in a sec. But I find it fascinating that Seurat is drawn not to something that is quote unquote pretty in a sort of impressionist way, but this more in-between zone.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Which is semi-industrialized, still sort of semi-rural on the outskirts of the city. That's the spot that he wants to immortalize in his painting. And not only that, but the title he gives the painting is called, um, Baynard, that's the French word. There was a brilliant Seurat scholar, American, who is called Robert L. Herbert, who curated this extraordinary Seurat exhibition that was at the Met and elsewhere, I think in Paris as well, at the beginning of the nineties. Um, immense scholarship. And he has pointed out that this word Baynard, which Seurat uses in the title, it was used on old maps at the time to signify a spot along the River Seine where you could take

• 21:48Speaker 01

  your dog or your horse and local boys would wash the animal. And so in some of these croquetons that you can see that Seurat is creating. You see horses. You also see rainbows, you see various things. He's playing around with, um, uh, the organization of the painting before the final form. But yeah, we should probably describe the painting itself.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Let's talk about the final form. So it's ready the following year, 1884. This is called The Bathers at Annier. We are very lucky to have it in the National Gallery in London. It's a very large picture, three meters wide, two meters high, much larger than a standard impressionist picture. And it shows a group of, I think, seven men and one dog relaxing on the banks of the River Seine on a sunny summer's day. We can see that there are two men or boys, they're swimming. One seems to be shouting to someone, he's holding his hands to his mouth. Another one is sitting undressed, his feet are in the water, either before or after having had a dip, while others, and we can see them receding into the distance, are lounging on the grass.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  So it's, it's really classic impressionist subject matter, modern life, modern leisure. But it doesn't feel that impressionistic, does it?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  It's such an enigmatic, complex work. And the astonishing thing is that when it's shown, when he paints it, Seurat's 24 years old.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  And you're right, on paper, it's people at leisure, it's suburbs of Paris, it's a bright sunny day. It feels like classic impressionist territory. At the same time, it also feels in some ways like it's tilting at classic salon painting territory. It's composition, the male bather. I mean, we've done a series about Michelangelo. He depicted male bathers. There's a time on a tradition there. The size of it, it's ambition and scale, it's monumentality. But it isn't a salon picture. In fact, he did submit it to the salon and it was rejected. And it isn't clearly an impressionist picture. It's something far stranger. And art historians and scholars have spent decades since this thing came into the world

• 23:51Speaker 01

  trying to understand who these people are and why, I mean, this for me is a central question about it. If it is this so-called allegory of summertime, this great sunny scene of leisure, why does everyone in it seem so glum?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  You know, people just, they look, they, they've got this purplish corpse-like skin. They seem quite sort of depressed. The central bather's very, very slumped, round-shouldered. He looks world-weary. If you look closely, you can barely see any of their mouths. So even the person who's shouting, that boy, he's covering his mouth. The others are either obscured by, um, shadow or perhaps by a shoulder or they're turned away. And even the central bather appears to be, well, he's certainly not smiling or grinning. Why that's significant is there is a sense here of a group of people, but they all seem to be isolated from, from one another. There's very little interaction. The only real noise is that shouting boy on the right, and he seems to be hollering

• 24:50Speaker 01

  at someone who's possibly on the other side, the other riverbank altogether. So lots of people looking at this, instead of seeing this, you know, the impressionist, a classic impressionist scene, you, you have a sense of bourgeois fun, pleasure, people dripping with bonhomie, dripping with money. You don't have that here. Instead, you almost have a bunch of people who probably are working class. There's a figure on the left who has a pink sash, loose trousers, that was a carpenter's outfit. You have that prominent factory vista in the background with the belching chimneys. It's almost a sense of, you know, they're on the clock.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Are they going to have to go back to their shift in the factory quite, quite soon? Is that why they're, they're so sad? But you're right. I mean, you presumably also don't really see this as a, as an impressionist picture, right?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  No, I think it's a totally weird picture. And I think you don't realize how weird it is until you go to the National Gallery and you see it in the flesh, because it's way too big for what it should be. And you think if this were a third of the size or a quarter of the size, a delightful little impressionist picture. But it's, it's a kind of impressionist picture that's been blown up too large. And so you can totally understand why people of the 1880s just didn't really know what to make of it.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Well, the brushwork is very different, isn't it? It's very chalky, very, very flat. And generally, the mood is quite, I think, quite static and quite somber. And the big theme of Seurat and what he's moving away, his challenge to impressionism, is that he's, instead of trying to capture the momentary and ephemeral moment that was a big impressionist concern, he's creating something that does feel both of the moment, but also quite timeless.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And I, I've got, I teed this up. I mean, you've already, you've let slip the WhatsApp exchange, but I teed, I, I've got a theory about the painter.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Oh, here he goes.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Which, which I'm fully anticipating you're going to naysay because that's your way, James, and it's terribly sad, you know, just, just go with it. But no, look, I know that there's a painter that's very close to your heart, who is a modern British painter called Stanley Spencer.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Love him.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And he famously, uh, painted a picture called The Resurrection at Cookham, along those lines. And what do you see there? You see people who are suddenly, at the end of time, um, being resurrected, right? They're emerging from their graves. Now, it's a little bit of a stretch, but there's something about this picture.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Why does this not surprise me?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  That feels to me like they're all experiencing this odd little revelation. Because there's a figure who's lying down in the foreground, who art historians, and surely you'd at least humor them, compared to ancient river gods, Seurat draws an ancient river god from the Parthenon early on, looks to me quite like tomb sculpture. There's a sense almost of a winding sheet of these shrouds. And there's this great river, the River Seine. And over on the other side, there's this strange, mysterious island that's going to become very significant in the second half. And I just can't help look at this and feel like there may be some echo of the ancient underworld, a sense of the river Styx, the way that figure in the, in the middle, he,

• 27:56Speaker 01

  he seems to be almost like he's rising in this zombie-like fashion, as though he's contemplating, and I can see from your expression, you're not going with this at all. And, and just to finish the theory, because I'll have you know that I put this theory to the National Gallery, who asked me to write a bloody book about this, James. And I think they were slightly dubious about this theory, but the curator, very sweetly, who vetted the text, seemed to go, well, you know, maybe there's, uh, room for, um, exploration here.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  How generous of them.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  But a little later, Seurat becomes friendly with a bunch of artists and writers indeed, who, um, are now known as the Symbolists. There's a really famous symbolist work of art that exists in many iterations called The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  In which you see this boat approaching an island, which is clearly a cemetery. And I just wonder whether there's something in the ether at this moment where perhaps you could link these two pictures in an ingenious way with a bit more time to be a bit more eloquent about it and lay out, lay your case out.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I'm not persuaded. Let me just put it there. Can I just share a little discovery of my own?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Maybe I have, maybe I'm not the first person to discover this, but, and I'm very excited about this. Do you remember a few months ago, we did a series about Vincent van Gogh?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  And do you remember we said that Vincent van Gogh didn't like his photograph taken? And there were only two adult photographs of him in existence, and one of them, he's not even looking at the camera.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  You mentioned this, I think we actually illustrated it in the episode.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It was with Emile Bernard.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  He's sitting on the riverbank.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  With Emile Bernard, his back is to the camera.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Now, I've looked very closely at that photograph and it is identical. The background of that photograph is identical to the background of this painting. What a coincidence.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Well, or, or.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  That this painting could be set in exactly the spot at which a mysterious photograph of Van Gogh was taken two years later.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Or, or is that not a sense of like, that, that does happen? There is a sense of the zeitgeist. It was interesting to artists at this moment who were progressive, they're looking for motifs, they're looking for subject matter, and they are exploring the city.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I can't.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Maybe Van Gogh went there after seeing this painting.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I can't quite remember the specifics of the photograph, but one of the interesting things is that Seurat is editing out some of the suburban architecture along the riverbank to create, I think, more of a sense of like this almost classical simplified frieze.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  But, you know.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Hopefully we can put side by side this painting and the photograph because it is stunning to see that background. I, I don't buy the Isle of the Dead analysis.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Ingenious, though it is.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Highly original.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Highly original.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Brilliantly intelligent, though it is.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Science fiction. But what I do think is absolutely true is you're completely right that you can see the railway bridge, you can see the chimneys and the factories of this working class area, of this industrial zone of cliche behind. And I'm sure you're right that the people in the foreground are workers from that site. So this is, this is an attempt to describe working class people relaxing. I don't think I'd go much further than that. It is a stunningly unforgettable picture. He submits it to the salon, the salon rejects it. Actually, a lot of artists are rejected that year. It's a very oversubscribed salon exhibition that year, and lots of them come together to create an alternative exhibition. It's a bit like the Impressionist exhibition, actually.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  And they staged a show in a temporary building, I think, in the Tweelerie.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  And they formed this group called the Society of Independent Artists. It's a totally chaotic exhibition. There's financial mismanagement, there are quarrels between artists, the police are called at some point, and they do not know what to do with Seurat's painting. They end up, I think, hanging it in the canteen.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the buffet. So he doesn't get a very good billing. On the other hand, this particular exhibition has been described by, there's a British art historian, Douglas Cooper, who called it the great artistic event in Paris in 1884. As you say, there is that chaos, there are more than 400 artists, the idea is you pay your fee, you can exhibit a couple of pictures. Seurat's painting is hung in the canteen, the buffet, whatever you want to call it, and it doesn't really attract very much attention.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  There's a little bit of press. There is a writer, French writer, who is friends with Zola and also friends with Cezanne, called Paul Alexis, who mocks it. It's the, it feels like classics of, you know, shock of the new moment, where he, he calls it ridiculous, he calls it a fake pouvier de cheval.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Ah, there you go.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Which is a reference that makes more sense when you know about that sort of classicising archaic simplicity of that older artist's work. And he says that he's not so keen on its earnestness, but he finds that almost moving, I can hardly bring myself to make fun of it.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  The great innovation of this picture, or at least the great aspiration of the picture, is I think Seurat is trying to cross-pollinate Impressionism with the classical tradition.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  He's trying to take what he's seen from Impressionist painting, the looser brushwork, the modern subject matter, but blow it up, if you like, to salon size and scale and produce this kind of very, it's a very frieze-like image, actually. All the figures are very composed, they're very sidon. So he's trying to bring those two things together in the hope that he can produce a salon painting that feels modish in that sense. And he obviously, he doesn't succeed in his attempt to get it into the salon. But by moving into the Society of Independent Artists, he makes this pivot, doesn't he, from being this aspirational academic artist to being part of what today we might call the avant-garde?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Well, this is where, you've already mentioned Cinyak, this is where he meets him at the Society of Independent Artists in 1884. And, you know, it's a good moment to pause, in a sense, because this is his first big picture. I accept that you haven't been, you're not buying into my theory about it as being a sort of proto-symbolist Isle of the Dead. Just you wait, in decades to come, there'll be people writing about that. But we can surely agree, you know, he's 24. There are not many young painters who can paint something on that scale with such aplomb, with such a sense of poetry. And it's a shame, in a way, that it wasn't recognised at the time. It's in the buffet, it's being ridiculed, it'd been rejected by the salon.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  In a sense, things aren't looking enormously promising for this 24-year-old. The interesting thing is that he is not deterred because within one week of the opening of the Salon des Independants, he was already at work on another monumental canvas, which would become his most famous picture. And that is the stunning composition that we're going to be talking about after the break. If you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  And a reminder, you can find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It is the 22nd of May, 1884. We can be quite specific about the date because Seurat recorded it. And Seurat, this very talented young French painter who's pioneering a new form of art, makes a start on his next big picture, which would make his name. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884. Now, look, it, it's a really extraordinary painting, right? Ostensibly recording middle classes at leisure, right? On a sunny Sunday afternoon, on this island in the river Seine called La Grande Jatte.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Which means in French, the great bowl.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  The great bowl.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  The great bowl. Yes, that's what it means because of the shape of the island. But it's a long, slim island in the middle of the Seine. And in the 1880s, it's a place where the wealthy, well-to-do, middle-class Parisians would go to have fun. There were restaurants, there were cafes, there were a lot of waffle sellers. You would go there to hire a fishing rod and do some fishing, you would go boating. The French of the, the Parisians of the 1880s were, really loved canoeing. So they'd often go canoeing. So it's a place of leisure, it's a place of decadence in that sense.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  I think the really interesting thing is that you can see the island in the earlier painting, the bathers. And there's this wonderful, you know, we, we didn't say this, we, we've withheld this wonderful detail in the first half, but if you look in the top right corner of the bathers, there's a load of greenery, you can see there's a tree which looks very sort of surreal, or almost David Hockney-like, that seems to be sloping along like a mollusk or something. And it's echoing this white sail. And that is a glimpse of the Grande Jatte.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And in front of it, there's a little ferry boat. This is in the bathers with some, not working class people, but someone with a top hat, woman with a parasol, French tricolour, which is, hasn't been unrolled, and they could almost be on their way.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  They possibly are, some of these chic urbanites. And there was this theory about this, which I love, because it's possible Seurat adds the detail of the ferry to the bathers later, because perhaps he's trying to make a link between the bathers and then this next painting, the one that's in Chicago, where he, he's flipping the viewpoint, isn't he?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. I find this relationship between the bathers, which we've discussed, and La Grande Jatte so, so interesting. One of the first scholars to really talk about this was the great Impressionist scholar, John Howes. Remarkable figure. I've got a little John Howes story because I really revered John Howes as an undergrad. And I remember 20 years ago, I went to the Met in New York, and I was in the Impressionist room, and I was looking at some Impressionist pictures, and an old man come and came down and sat next to me, and we started chatting about these pictures, and he knew an enormous amount. And at the end of the conversation, he said, oh, I'm John Howes. And I went, you're John Howes, you're my hero. Anyway, he's dead now, unfortunately, but he was the first person who started to think about the relationship between these pictures.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  It is so fascinating.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Because these pictures, as you suggest, are not just near each other, they are right opposite each other on the river. Couple of days ago, I spent some time on Google Maps and I plotted their exact location. They are exactly opposite each other on either side of the river, 175 metres apart.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Depending on how you, how you plot it. And. I hope that for our viewers, we're able to place these pictures side by side. Because when you place them side by side, you can totally see they're kind of facing off against each other across the river. It's not a continuous landscape, the horizon line changes. But you're right, when you're looking at the Bathers, on the right, you can see the edge of La Grande Jatte. And when you're looking at La Grande Jatte, you can see Annier, you can see the white wall that runs along Annier. And I'm really pleased you mentioned this boat. Because in the Bathers, we have this little boat going across the river with a tricolot, a French flag behind it. If you look at La Grande Jatte, Alastair, that boat is there.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Right at the back, you can see a boat with a French flag at the back of it that has reached La Grande Jatte.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  I think there are other ways he's stitching together these two pictures in a subtle manner. You can also see next to the ferry in the Bathers, there's just the beginnings of what's a racing shell, someone rowing.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  And you see, there's one figure in it, it's cut off by the edge, the right-hand edge of the canvas. You can see a full racing shell in the Grand Jatte, this time with a female cox and a crew of four. You also have other echoes, there's, you've mentioned the boy in the Bathers who has a strange sun helmet on, like a bit of a flower pot, terracotta coloured, and he's hollowing, covering his mouth with his hands. Well, if you look in the Grand Jatte, in the middle distance, there is another boy who's facing the same way, he has a very similar shaped hat. This time, he's not shouting, but he's blowing a French horn, which seemingly, there's a little joke, there are a couple of soldiers who are beyond him, who seem to be standing to attention.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  But, you know, so it's interesting to hear you talk about it, because in a sense, one of the big questions about the Grand Jatte is, is it a counterpart to the Bathers?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  I think it is.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And I think you feel definitely, I think I feel pretty convinced that it is as well, in a sophisticated way, not in a kind of literal, you know, let's look at these two, but there is a clear relationship between them.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And one of the things about it that then brings you on to is, okay, so if the people in the Bathers are perhaps working class types who are working in the factory, who are the people in the Grand Jatte painting? Now, interestingly, you probably would have seen from this view, factory chimneys, a sense of industrialised landscape. This time, Seurat edits them out, and instead, you have a lot of people who seem to come from a different social milieu.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when you see them together, I think it seems to me quite clear that the Bathers is a picture of the working class on one side of the river, and La Grande Jatte is a picture of primarily, not exclusively, but primarily the middle class on the leisure island on the other side.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  It's more complicated in terms of the cast has expanded since the Bathers. I think there are three dogs, a number of boats, around about 50 figures, and you can see them moving away from the nearest part of the picture through to the distance of the park. The picture's structured by the uprights of the trunks and also the uprights of various figures. And you have these little groupings, I mean, you know, I've mentioned, there's a boy who's playing a French horn, and soldiers behind him are standing to attention. In the foreground, you have a little pug dog that seems to be running at a black dog, and then in sunshine, just above the black dog, you can see a butterfly, a lovely little grace note in the painting that's fluttering about that I mentioned at the very start. You have these people who are looking out across the water.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  But when you start to look again, the difference with the Bathers is things are getting a little bit stranger. One of the strange aspects of it is distortions of scale that Seurat is using. So if you just look at just the foreground of the painting, I mentioned at the very start that everything's dominated by this couple on the right, we'll come to them in a moment, but they're quite big, right? Simple point. On the left, you have another grouping of people who are seated or lying down on the grass, interesting in the Bathers, reclining figure in the foreground, here's another reclining figure in the foreground, who possibly is a sort of boatman and maybe more associated with the working class. Behind him, there's this dandyish figure with a cane, silhouetted, and a top hat. He's on the same plane as that couple in the foreground on the right, but if he stands

• 42:42Speaker 01

  up, he sort of comes up to her breasts or the man's shoulders, it's really, really strange. One of the things, just before we get stuck into it, in terms of the preparation, you have a similar process where Seurat is making a series of drawings, and he's making a series of probably croqueton, and then even some actual canvases in preparation as he's finessing the composition in the painting. One of the things I find interesting about it is that both with the Bathers and with the Grand Jatte, he actually paints at one point just the landscape, devoid of figures. So it's like he is playing, being a theatre director.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  He creates his stage, and then he seems to, in the case of the Grand Jatte, he seems to be auditioning different people, placing them around. And actually, when you look at this painting, and this is where, you know, we'll get into the meat of the discussion, but there are differences with the Bathers, it does have a slightly different feel. The people in it, and indeed, the way the landscape has been painted, feel to me, anyway, much more like theatrical flats. They feel quite flat, the people themselves, they have a slightly, I always think, when I look at this, my first response is those individuals are slightly kind of almost like whirring mechanical toys, that are like, in they come, and they could easily be wheeled off. They don't feel like they perhaps have a great, fully-fleshed human psychology to them, and I think that's probably deliberate.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  It's very artificial, very synthetic, you know what, it reminds me of, you know, when architects make a plan for a new city park they're going to develop, and they have the Photoshop figures stuck on top of the new park, that's what it feels like, he's just placing these figures like little marionettes or dolls onto his little stage set.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  But that's not a criticism, I mean, lots of people have suggested that that is the thrust of the painting. And in a sense, what you have here is a slightly more ironic, satirical mode, where he's lampooning bourgeois society and customs in a way that supposedly he isn't with the workers on the bank at Annier. There is a worker that you can see in the Grand Jatte image. If you look again, that sort of, not the immediate foreground, but the sort of middle distance, there's an old woman who's very hunched over, and she has a parasol that she's barely strong enough to hold aloft above her head, it's sort of descended, it's like sitting like a hat on top of her head. And next to her is what looks like an arrangement of boulders or a cairn on a mountain top.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  That is the back of her attendant, and it's likely that that is the only quote-unquote worker that you see within this scene. And then you have these figures, a couple of women who are by the shore, one of whom is fishing, and perhaps here, we get into a potential moment of disagreement, James, because I'm reminded, well, I don't know, I'm reminded of our, I really love the episode we did about Vermeer's milkmaid.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  And much of that was discussing the significance of the foot warmer that Vermeer painted in this picture.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  We've only just made up.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  We've only just made up. Whether it signified the erotic thoughts that were passing through the milkmaid's head, I was adamant that it did, and could be a metaphor for all sorts of things, but you were less keen on that idea. Well, there is another ingenious interpretation of this painting, isn't there? Which is that somehow, Seurat possibly is lampooning bourgeois attitudes towards prostitution. And the woman who's fishing on the left of the picture, some people have said, well, maybe she's actually a sex worker. On this island, it was known that there were lots of sex workers who went about their business. Is she fishing to catch a man, as it were, to catch a client?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  There is a possible pun that's going on, the word pêché or pêcheur, it can mean, depending on how it's spelt, two different things in French, it can mean to fish or to sin. And then you look at the couple again on the right, and some people interpret the woman, as brilliant French word, a cocotte, a kept, very elegantly dressed woman, or the mistress of that man. And part of the reason they say that is because she has on this leash, as I said at the start, this monkey. There are some wonderful drawings, when he decided that he wants to add a monkey into the picture, he goes to the zoo, Seurat, there are five drawings of monkeys, stunning things. And a monkey, of course, I think monkeys have come up before in this series, time-honoured symbol of lust.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  So, I'm dying to hear whether you think there's anything to this idea.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  I don't buy it at all.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Oh, come on, this one surely you have to buy.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Look, when everyone always, I've heard it so many times, when people talk about La Grande Jatte, the first thing they say is, well, the woman on the right, with great authority, they say, the woman on the right with the monkey is a prostitute, because of course, the monkey, and the woman on the left, fishing, is clearly also a sex worker. I just don't think there's any evidence for that. I think a lot of people also say, well, contemporaries would have immediately understood the meaning of this. Well, I don't think that's even true either. I went back to look at contemporary responses to this picture, and there were lots of them, and only one contemporary, and he wasn't even French, he was Irish, the author, George Moore, even tentatively suggested that a sex worker might be involved in this picture. And also, when I look at that woman on the right and the man next to her, what I see

• 47:56Speaker 00

  is an extremely prim and proper bourgeois couple who have a posh pet.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Okay, what do you think is the significance of the monkey?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Well, he adds the monkey later. He adds the monkey later.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  I've read that. I never quite get that because actually if you look at the Herbert catalogue, he's already drawing the monkey in the zoo, but he dates it in the first campaign. But I know that some people say that the monkey comes later, yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Thing that Seurat does is he experiments with lots of different things. He's doing lots of different variations, he's moving his characters around. Sometimes in some of the preparatory sketches, she is on her own, sometimes he is on his own. The monkey comes later. The idea that this is absolutely central to the meaning of the picture seems to me unlikely, given that process.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  But bear in mind that this is Seurat we're talking about, who was as his friend, and then he got a bit irritated with him, Pizarro, who actually is the guy who invites him to exhibit this at the Impressionist exhibition of 1886. He once said that Seurat is impregnated with the traditions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. So he is conscious of that tradition, the idea of allegories, symbols, things that you can be used. You know, he's not a naïve, he's not including a monkey purely for that reason. I think to me, if you leave aside the cocotte question, which is a moot point, you can't really argue it one way or the other. But definitely there seems to be something here where there's a satirical component.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  I have a friend who is, who I love very dearly and is a really flamboyant dresser. And I remember his brother giving his best man's speech, took him down for, he used to turn up at London Fields in Hackney in East London when he was much younger, riding a unicycle. And there's something about that monkey, which it's almost like that slightly, dare I say, pretentious quality. And I think that Seurat is aware of that. You'd agree that he is trying to satirise that character.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  I think, yes, I think that we know from research that lots of wealthy people in Paris had pet monkeys and other exotic pets. And we also know, by the way, that lots of middle-class women went fishing. It was a fashionable thing to do on La Grande Jatte to go fishing. So I think that if this is anything, it is ridiculing perhaps the pretentiousness of the bourgeoisie.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Shall we talk about the technique a little bit?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  This is a really important part of the picture. And it's quite a complex story because actually Seurat makes, there are sort of three separate campaigns, if you like, that he makes on this picture. So he begins it in 1884, he works on it through to 1885. His plan is to exhibit it at the second independent society exhibition, which collapses. I've said it's pretty chaotic. So then he goes away on holiday in the summer of 1885, returns and repaints it in very interesting ways. And then actually, he goes at it again in 1889, when he paints this bluish-purple frame around the picture.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  A border, yeah, with dots.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  A border. So really interesting to look at what he's doing here with his technique. And people talk about dots, but it's not only dots, is it? There's an extraordinary range of brushwork going on here.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Interestingly, if you look at some of the tree trunks in the background, you can see that some of the dots become a little more elongated, slightly more like, I don't know, jelly beans. And the orientation varies as he's following. They're describing the contours, the directions, if you like, of the branches as they go off in different directions. Is this the moment where we're doing colour theory? I mean, I almost would like to not do it at all, but that's just because it leaves me incredibly cold. Every time I'm reading about Seurat and there's something about the colour wheel and complementary colours, I'm like, oh god. Nevertheless, it is important, isn't it?

• 51:47Speaker 00

  We do need to address it, I think. So during the early 1880s, during that laboratory phase, when the notary is reading all these books, he reads a lot of colour theory and there are a couple of people he's really inspired by. And one of them is a chemist, French chemist called Chevreul, who's this remarkable figure. I mean, I think he's, he's still alive when Seurat paints this, but he's about 100 years old. I think he was born before the French Revolution. And actually, he's one of the, one of the inventors of margarine.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 52:16Speaker 00

  As it turns out, yes. But he was also very interested in colour. And in the 1830s, he had written this book about colour where he had advanced this theory about what he called simultaneous contrast. I know you're falling asleep as I'm saying it.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  I am completely glazing over, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I'm back with you, I'm back in the room.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  But the idea of simultaneous contrast is that essentially colours affect other colours. So if you place one colour next to another, it will change both of those colours. And particularly when it comes to complementary colours. So if you put a red next to a green, they're complementaries. The red will seem redder and the green will seem greener. And Seurat is very interested in the possibilities of intensifying his colours by doing this. He also reads a French translation of an American physicist called Ogden Rood. And Rood's idea is this idea of retinal mixing. He thinks that if you place two colours together, very small strokes together, and you stand at a distance, they will mix themselves on your retina.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  So if you put a blue, tiny little spot of blue next to a spot of yellow, they will become green in your eyes, not on the palette itself or on the canvas. So Seurat is interested in these ideas of what he can do with colour. If he changes his brushstrokes, if he places different kinds of hues together, he could create really exciting colour and light effects.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  And this is where you get in art history, all sorts of labels to describe this moment, where essentially, you know, I characterized him at the beginning as being the painter of dots. This is what he's doing, right? So he calls this new technique, he develops chromoluminarism.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Some people call it obviously pointillism, it becomes known as divisionism. Gradually, this is all subsumed under the banner neo-impressionism. Actually, quite soon that's coined at the moment this painting is displayed. And, I mean, look, from my point of view, the big picture thing is, he is, this optical mixture idea is quite important and very easy to grasp. Artists traditionally, they're mixing their colours on a palette.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  But Seurat's not doing that, is he? He's painting, he's putting down pure pigment and the idea is that they get, as you say, blended in the eye. My thing is that I don't think that happens. You know, this is the great theory, whenever I look at a divisionist painting or a pointillist painting, this idea that you just see all of the dots. What you do have is a really vibrant sense of shimmering luminosity.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  I think that's what, I think that's what it's all about. And I think we can, hopefully we can zoom in on this picture for our viewers and they can see. If you zoom, for instance, to, we could take any part of the picture. But if you go to the bottom left of the painting, we can see a shady bit of grass. And in the first campaign of the picture, it's relatively conventional, he's put some dark green on, quite broad brushstrokes. And then when he's returned to the picture in 1885, 1886, he started adding his little dots. And you can see he's putting in little dots of yellow for the light. And he's putting next to them little dots of purple and blue for the shade. And then he's taking colours that are reflected off other surfaces and putting those dots in. And occasionally he'll put complementaries next to each other. It's not a scientific method.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  He does it in a half-hearted way, actually with the bathers. He returns to particular passages. And so the famous boy that we've spoken about a lot, who's hollering with the hat, he has almost like glittering confetti that's suddenly cascading down his back. You know, there are lots of dots all over the helmet itself, but he doesn't do it throughout.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  He sort of gives up. It's a very laborious method. But he does it across the surface of this picture. And then, as I said, in 1889, he goes and he puts this frame, he paints this interior frame around the picture of blues and purples in order to set off the complementaries within, the lighter colours, the yellows and things within. I don't think it's remotely scientific, but visually, it is extremely powerful. The other thing he does, actually in that second phase in 1885, 86, is he moves from the earthier colours towards what we call prismatic colours. So he starts to make, for instance, his shadows, not from browns and blacks, but from violets and blues. And that means that this picture, it totally does.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  When you see it in the flesh, even when you see it as a reproduction, it does have this shimmering, magical, hallucinatory quality, doesn't it?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  I think there's something else which I find really fascinating about the dots, which is, I accept that it is my prejudice to be left a bit cold by all the discussion of the colour theory. I guess it's partly that my instinct is a bit like you've just expressed. I'm not convinced this really is scientific, even though it's supposedly drawing upon science. I don't think, you know, this idea that, as he said, I apply my method and that's all there is to it, is actually a bit of a feint, it's not quite true. But where you, where I think things become very interesting, thinking about the dots, is that some art historians have seen them almost as like themselves, a sort of metaphor, for modernity. You know, if you look forward, it's suddenly, it's a world of mass production.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  You know, the dots that become very important in 20th century art, in artists like Lichtenstein or Warhol.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  And pixels.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  And pixels today, there's a genuine trajectory that can be traced, can't there? From Seurat through, he's anticipating, if you like, that there is a new mode of looking at the world and representation. And I think the modernity of it is broadcast by the way he's painting, as much as what he's painting.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  It's almost quite proto-cinematic, isn't it, as well? Especially when you see it against that shimmering bluish-purple surround. And of course cinema would be invented about 10 years later. But there's a real sense of a different kind of image-making coming on here and it's really, really exciting.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Out of this or the bathers, I prefer this as a painting. There's so much to see, to potentially decode, to try and understand what is going on.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  I think.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  We will not be able to crack the code of what it could mean allegorically. But the thing I find so fascinating about art history is that compare and contrast. And we've established that he's looking as a young artist, and he's still a young artist when he paints this, but he's looking at the Impressionists. Why this is exciting is that it is this great challenge

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  against Impressionism. And, you know, one way you can think about that is there are so many details here of this specific moment. I mean, you've mentioned a vogue for these exotic pets. He includes the year, as I've said, in the title. He's making plain this is 1884.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  I have this theory about that year.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Okay, go on.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Okay, you can shoot this one down if you want.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  I'm much more open to these things, as you know, I'm gonna love it.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Okay, I've always wondered why he includes the year. Why include the year 1884 in the title? Now, there are a couple of potential theories. One could be that this is the moment he conceives it and he wants to remind viewers of the moment on Ascension Day, May 1884, when he spotted this scene. The other thing is he's potentially connecting it to the bathers, which was 1884. My theory is that, of course, Surratt is trying very hard in his work to connect his painting to the grand neoclassical tradition. And the neoclassical tradition in France begins with Jacques-Louis David's painting

• 59:34Speaker 00

  The Oath of the Horatshai from 1784, exactly 100 years earlier. I'm wondering whether that date is an attempt to connect Surratt's work to a grand academic, very ambitious, very French tradition.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  You see, I think that's a very interesting idea. Original, well put. No, no, that is an interesting conceit. I suppose to me, I see it more, and this is where I was about to go before, as it's part of, it's a bit of a joke. It's thumbing his nose at Impressionism. I mean, we've established that Impressionism is all about capturing the moment, a fleeting moment. And here's Surratt saying, this is a moment on a specific Sunday in 1884, not 1883, not 1885, on 1884. And if you look at the preparatory drawings, there's something very interesting he does. We've spoken about the potential cocotte on the right, the woman on the right, the one with the monkey.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  She has this enormous posterior, she has this big bustle, huge bustle, sort of silhouette as you see in profile. One of his drawings is a specific study of that element of a woman's dress. And from what I've read, the vogue for the bustle was at its biggest, its most voluminous, in the mid 1880s. So again, Surratt is dissecting, capturing, recording a specific moment in time. But at the same time, he's doing something else which is really different and new, which is he's trying to create, as he put it, almost like a freeze that the classical Greeks might have had, something that feels quite timeless and idealized and not at all of the moment in that Impressionist way.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  And I think there's a bigger trend, a bigger shift that's occurring here, which is, you know, whether you call it divisionism or neo-impressionism, a lot of these different movements are grouped together under the rubric, sometimes, post-impressionism, a reaction against Impressionism. And Cezanne, who we've already mentioned in this episode, he, this to me is always how, you know, I think about post-impressionism. He said that for him, what he was trying to do was create something solid and durable, like the art of the museums. And I think that's exactly what Surratt is doing here. So it is a paradox. It's time-specific, 1884, and it's timeless.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that's exactly right. I totally agree with you. I think that is the great achievement of Surratt, and it's the great achievement of Cezanne, is this attempt to reconcile modern Impressionist painting with something that feels more historic, more classical, more composed. But it is nevertheless a very strange picture. Can I read, I'm actually reminded of something you said earlier about the bathers, about the Isle of the Dead.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Do you know what the Marxist Ernst Bloch wrote about this painting? He said, "This picture is one single mosaic of boredom. The painting depicts a middle-class Sunday morning on an island in the Seine near Paris", and that is just the point. "It depicts this merely with scorn. Empty-faced people rest in the foreground. Most of the others have been grouped into wooden verticals like dolls from the toy box, intensely involved in a stiff little walk. Behind them is the pale river with sailboats, a sculling match, sightseeing boats, a background that despite the recreation going on there, seems to belong more to Hades than to a Sunday."

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Hades, I'm telling you. I mean, the man is on to something. That is not the Seine, it's the river Styx end of. Yes, I think Surratt here is concerned with his moment. That is the greatness of the painting. It isn't one thing or the other, like a moment of its time or timeless. He is expressing something about the alienation, isolation of modern urban life, and particularly amongst the bourgeois classes that he's depicting here. And he's creating something that has that stability, that feel of a classic picture that you might see in the museum.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Let's talk a little bit about the reception of the painting, Alastair. The picture goes on display at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Lots of the Impressionists don't actually want it to be shown there, but good old Pizarro, my hero, he persuades them, and the painting goes on show. It's not that well received, is it?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  It's not enormously well received, but it does make his name. It's even written about in London. And the interesting thing, in an art historical sense, is he then shows it a few months later at the next exhibition, the second of the Society of Independent Artists. And this is the moment where there's a writer called Felix Feneault, and he, at this moment in an article, deploys in print, you know, I love bigging up those moments where a critic or someone is writing something for the first time, and he deploys the term neo-impressionist method. So it's at this moment that the movement of neo-impressionism, thanks to La Grande Jatte, is born. But this is the second of these six great canvases that Surratt creates in the course of his career. This one probably is his best known.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it does filter into popular culture in all sorts of ways.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  God, yeah. I mean, it's one of those pictures that really cuts through into popular culture. And there are not many pictures that actually do that, but La Grande Jatte does. In 1984, it becomes the subject of a musical. Stephen Sondheim writes a musical a hundred years after La Grande Jatte. We see it in, two years after that, in 1986, it's in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  It's such a good moment.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  That's when I think I first saw this picture

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  in that movie, when I think one of the characters, Cameron, goes to the museum and is kind of completely bewildered by it.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  He's mesmerized.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  He's mesmerized by it. And then he, and then it's in The Simpsons. I think if there is any measure of a painting's success, if it gets into The Simpsons, you know it's really cut through. There is a park in Ohio, La Grande Jatte Park, where they have recreated the characters as topiary, in topiary. So it really does cut through. But, I mean, I think we should bring this episode to a close with really a little coda about Surratt himself, because as you say, he goes on to make a series of other great paintings, but he doesn't have long to live.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Because in the spring of 1891, so this is, what, five years after displaying this picture, he catches a cold, doesn't think anything of it, but gets more and more unwell. And eventually, on the 27th of March, 1891, Good Friday, he's so unwell that he gets taken to his mother's apartment. And this is when this great secret is finally revealed, because he doesn't come alone to his mother's apartment. He comes with a working-class woman who is pregnant and a one-year-old boy. And it transpires that this is his mistress, and this is his son, and he's never told his family. So he's living this double life, just as his father was leading a double life.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  And there is very little time for argument, because on the Saturday he gets even more unwell, and on the Sunday, 6am on Sunday morning, Easter Sunday, he chokes to death on his own mucus. He has diphtheria. And poor Georges Surratt dies aged 31. The other great tragedy of this is his son, his one-year-old son catches the same illness and dies two weeks later. A month after that, Georges Surratt's father dies. His mistress then gives birth to the second child, and that child dies. So in the space of just a few months, three generations of the Surratt family are wiped out. And just to sort of end this, Alastair, where do you think he would have gone?

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  It's a counterfactual, died age 31. Where do you think he was heading as an artist?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  It's quite interesting that the responses to his work amongst his supporters were starting slightly to tail off towards the end of his life. There was a feeling that he was moving too much into caricature, that you can see in the final canvases. I think he would have continued to interrogate what it meant to be modern. I think that's a huge part of what he does. And if you like, one of the things, you know, we haven't even touched on this, but there was a wonderful show, I think it was this year, at the Courtauld Gallery, which was all about Surratt's seascapes, because in the final few years of his life, he spends his summer campaigns often on the coast in Normandy. He paints his unbelievable marines, which are

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  They're my favorites, actually.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  They're so stunning. They're, again, really, really poetic, but very few people. It's sort of like High Days and Holidays, but without the people and high jinks of being on a summer holiday. Classically Surratt, in a sense. And one of the things that people who spend time looking at those often observe is that they seem to throw forwards to various traditions and movements, if you like, of modern art in the 20th century. And if you look at Surratt's oeuvre altogether, I mean, he seems to be anticipating abstract art.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Bridget Riley loves Surratt, op art, a sense maybe even of minimalism and pop art. I mean, I mentioned the dots before and the idea of the elimination of the artist's hand that was so important for many 20th century artists like Warhol or Lichtenstein. And I think one of the things that he's doing in his pictures, presumably consciously, is he's really drawing attention to their surface

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  as an aspect of the work. And that becomes something, instead of being a picture onto a wider world, you know, in the bathers and in the Grande Jatte, there is no clear moralizing narrative, which was a hallmark of older art, 19th century art, that would have been shown at the salon. That's all jettisoned. The way they're painted is drawing the viewer's attention to the fact that these are constructed pictorial surfaces. And that's an idea that loads of artists subsequently really run with.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  I think he's anticipating abstraction. I think what he's doing in these images, we can talk all we like about the middle classes and the working classes and sex workers and modern life, but I think what he's doing is he's trying to construct images on purely pictorial grounds, on colour and line and form and harmony. And I do think that had he had, say, another 10 years, the notary might have produced the first abstract paintings, even in the 19th century, who knows?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Which is a wonderful thought to end with, I think, James. Thank you very much for today, and goodbye.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Goodbye. Next time we have a Halloween treat in store, we'll be telling the absurdly exciting story of Edvard Munch's The Scream.