Study for “La Grande Jatte”

The island park of la Grande Jatte prompted the most laboriously prepared picture of the century, and this tiny panel is one of the celebrated studies made on the way to A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It belongs to the years 1884-85 in which Georges Seurat worked out the riverside prospect that the monumental canvas would bring to completion, testing composition and light in oils of a few inches before the design grew to cover some ten feet. The small scale makes the ambition of the undertaking the more striking, for the whole sociability of a modern Sunday crowd is present in miniature. The study entered the National Gallery of Art in 1970.