Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" is one of the best known paintings of the 19th century, presenting us with all of the lush color of more mainline Impressionist works and the formalist scientific bent of much of the French artworld at the time (which considered the Pointillist style of Seurat and others as a psychologically accurate way to depict the world) along with an eye for social criticism. This paper examine the formal elements of this 1884 oil painting as well as discussing the artistic context from which it arose. The body of work that Seurat left to the world is a relatively small one for two separate reasons. The first is that he died when he was only 31. The second was that he was a meticulous artist whose technique depended heavily on making preliminary sketches and oil sketches: Each finished painting represented months of work as well as numerous versions.
As Kemp (1992) relates, Seurat's most important influence as an artist came while he was a student at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, when
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