Sarah is a member of the class of 2008 at Princeton University, where she studies Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. So how, might you ask, did she decide to take a Writing Seminar on Impressionist Art? She'll tell you it's the farthest one could possibly remove themselves away from math and science courses. That's not to say she doesn't like art�she still enjoys visiting museums all over the world, but twenty years down the road, she'd rather be building rockets for NASA than analyzing paintings.
For her final project, she decided to write about Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat because he was the only artist in this era who exemplified the rare but intriguing bridge between science and art. It gave Sarah the opportunity to revert back to the same books Seurat read in 1880 when he studied color theory. She was very happy to find that, despite common perception, art can be scientific!
Aside from her interests in science and art, Sarah considers herself a pilot of many things. She is coxswain on the Men's Lightweight Crew Team at Princeton (yes, girls are allowed on the men's team!), where she steers a 60-foot long boat with a rudder the size of a credit card while motivating the team. She also enjoys flying planes when she's home in California. Of course, she also drives cars, but it isn't quite as easy as it sounds; Sarah got her pilot's license before she got her driver's license, and still experiences some trouble making the adjustment from a plane with left and right steering pedals to a car's brake and accelerator, making for some tough times at forks in roads.
While there is only a brief reference to La Grande Jatte in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, almost everyone who has seen it remembers the part when Cameron Frye stands gazing at the painting in the Art Insititute of Chicago on his "day off" from school. The camera pans back and forth between Cameron's perplexed facial expression and the painting, although with each shot of the painting, the camera zooms in, capturing more detail. First, we see the painting in the middle of the gallery, where it looks like an ordinary painting, and we eventually get close enough to see the lady in the pink skirt and her child, and finally, close detail of the child's face. We see the specific colors in her lips: a spectrum of yellows, pinks, light blues and greens. Just like Cameron, we are enthralled with Seurat's attention-grabbing dots which speckle the face of the young child's face.
The director, John Hughes, made a noteworthy decision to zoom in on the child's face, which contains a myriad of seemingly unrelated colors. If he had wanted to demonstrate Seurat's ability to juxtapose complementary colors, he could have found another portion of the painting that came closer to (but not exactly like) Seurat's ideal divisionist technique. Perhaps the director was playing up the fact that the public recognizes Seurat's dots, not contrasting colors.
Seurat tried to create contrast not only within the painting itself, but also between the canvas and its frame. He added borders in one of two ways: by painting an extension of the painting onto a wood frame or by actually stretching the canvas to allow for an extra few inches of room in which to paint the border. While many artists, like Edgar Degas, were obsessed with the framing of their works, few actually painted their own like Seurat. He desired to enhance his paintings past their original face value. It is a common disbelief that he painted continuously from the canvas to the frame in the same sitting, or even while they were attached. Instead, he usually displayed the work for a while and then would return back to the piece years later to add finishing touches in the form of a frame.
In the case of La Grande Jatte, Seurat exhibited the completed painting in 1885, but managed to return four years later in 1889 to add a border. 
This time, he stretched the canvas two to three inches on each side of the two by three meter painting. These borders were clearly intended to offer a contrast to the landscape in the painting itself, using the simple rules of color theory dictated by Chevreul and Rood. In this one case, Seurat came close to achieving sucess using complementary colors. Opposite the green grass, he painted with more of a reddish hue, while he bordered the blue sky with orange dots. He still did not fully succeed the ideal balance between colors because he incorporated more colors than were neccessary. However, such an advancement shows that he better understood color theory later in his career.
What was Georges Seurat looking at when he painted the sketches for his Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte masterpiece? The lush green Ile de la Grande Jatte, which means Big Bowl Island, created the perfect setting for Seurat's depiction of a relaxing Sunday Afternoon. Its grassy banks provided a comfortable and secluded getaway for wealthy Parisians. The mile-long island, located on the Seine in the Neuilly-sur-Seine department of Paris, has always been known for its class and leisure. Four miles to the northwest of Paris, it was just far away enough from the metropolis for people to experience a more relaxed atmosphere where women could fish, children could run around at ease, and men could lounge in the shade.
The island provided settings for other artists besides Seurat, offering us a further idea of what the island looked like before it was industrialized. Sisley painted a very different scene than Seurat's in La Grande Jatte. It is composed of a wooded shore, covered with broken logs and snags. Could this be the same island Seurat was seeing? It was most likely scene from the other side of the island. The general demeanor of this painting is different, too. While Seurat painted a peaceful Sunday afternoon scene, Sisley's La Grande Jatte is draped with sombre-looking clouds, making it much less appealing.
Claude Monet also painted an image of the island, and his vantage point looks up-river rather than down-river. The Seine appears very much like it does in La Grande Jatte, but the shoreline takes on a different character with the inclusion of a winding promenade. Behind the path, the island is thickly wooded, as opposed to the great expanse of green grass that Seurat saw. As a result of the trees and the path, there is only enough room for a few people to lounge on the limited grass area. Still, Monet illustrates a more peaceful and relaxing Sunday than Sisley.
Which of these artists was correct in their depiction of La Grande Jatte? Based on the two antique photographs of the banks and the selected modern photograph of the modern day island, La Grande Jatte by Seurat best captures the sloping green down to the bank of the peaceful river. Perhaps it was Seurat's meticulous style that forced him to replicate what he saw with such attention to detail.]]>
To begin examining 19th century color theory, we must first know the basics: color is classified according to different wavelengths of light, creating a continuous spectrum with no beginning or end. We often take color for granted, but considering that our entire world is covered in it, we should better understand it. Beginning in the 19th century, scientists began to ask questions about color. While some questions, like "What is color?" had been answered, one question stumped scientists and artists alike for years: Which combinations of these colors are appealing to the eye? Understanding this question would give artists the information they needed to cater their artwork to the public eye.
So, what does it mean when these colors are appealing? Do they make you feel any happier? Not exactly. Take, for instance, brown and red. Somewhere between the eye and the brain, we register that these colors do not look good together. In fact, they clash. This is very much like hearing two adjacent piano keys played at once. Appealing color combinations can be defined as the opposite of dissonant.
To further capitalize on complementary colors' pleasing effects, both Chevreul and Rood experimented and discovered that abrupt contrasts between two colors created the greatest effect. We can see in the series of color plates below a simulation of such a study. The first image demonstrates color blending as most artists do on their canvases. While there is still a distinction between the colors, they do not seem as vibrant as in the next plate. Because of their mixing, the two hues become more alike and therefore lose the intended contrast.
The color theorists did not stop their research there. Rood continued to study color with applications to art and explained that by using small spots on the canvas rather than large blocks of color, the image would be further enhanced. Here, we see the contrast between color blocks and many dots. The multitude of dots on the right side of the image gives the viewer more of a sense of contrast, creating for a harmonized image. Styles similar to this final swatch appear again and again in Seurat's work, as well as in some of his contemporaries' art.
Now that we have access to the collection more than a hundred years after its conception, we have the ability to follow Seurat's development of his style throughout his search for the precise formula. In addition to the information provided by his studies, his private letters have reminded us of Seurat's original reasoning for his pursuit of Chevreul and Rood's scientific color theory: to create artwork that had the ability to induce relaxation in its viewers. Yet, Seurat never reached his goal, even after years of copious research and ample understanding of the subject. His masterpiece went a step too far; he dotted layer upon layer of color, only to lose the careful planning he had done. But even though Seurat didn't reach his goal, was it all a lost cause?
This brushstroke size problem is resolved in Seurat's final painting of the series. Its size alone alerts the viewer to its importance as a development in the art world. Covered in a multitude of tiny points, which range in size from a pin head to a dime, the painting's presentation is utterly breathtaking. Was this the effect Seurat had intended? It excites the viewer to see the effects of years of meticulous work, but it fails to calm the viewer to a relaxed, blissful state as Seurat had envisioned. The busyness of the points overwhelms the canvas. For example, the man's outstretched leg in the left foreground is a rainbow of colors; the pants appear white in the illuminated portion, but in the shadows, they are really speckled with a myriad of primary and secondary colors. Seurat has the right idea of using unexpected colors to enhance the image, but in this case, he went overboard. He used at least six different colors in the white pants alone, dizzying the audience to the point where they have a hard time absorbing the rest of the two-by-three meter painting.
Seurat began to employ his knowledge of color theory before attempting to do so in La Grande Jatte, but this collection of studies and masterpiece most clearly exhibits the chronological progression and eventual regression of his pointillist style. Fortunately, in looking at La Grande Jatte, we are really looking at an entire series of 59 paintings, showing the methodical process Seurat led to produce one of his six large-scale masterpieces (Herbert 264). The increasing pointillist brushstroke techniques and contrasting color harmony in the studies positively evolve over time, illustrating Rood and Chevreul's growing influence on Seurat as his career progressed, not to mention his increasing artistic capability. The earliest cataloged study for La Grande Jatte, called Figures on the Shore (1883) brings us back to typical Impressionist style. That is, it uses broad, imprecise brushstrokes to give us an impression of the scene. Seurat attempts no blending, leaving lumps of paint to define whole shapes of one color. In fact, a total of two colors, aside from black and white, are used. These two colors, green and yellow, fail to complement each other. In fact, they are so near each other on the color spectrum, as seen in Rood's color circle, that they literally blend with each other on the canvas. While Seurat was clearly familiar with color theory at this time, he probably chose not to use it for such a simple sketch.
Over time, his sketches became more detailed and finished in order to practice the real techniques he would be using in the final. In Fisherman (1883), the next supposed study for La Grande Jatte, Seurat again uses steady, broad brushstrokes to depict the static scene. This approach is still quite far off from the tiny dotted brushstrokes typical of pointillism, but it shows improvement from the wider color blocks in Figures on the Shore. In terms of color, after looking at it in close detail, it appears to contain only three main hues: blue, green, and beige, not even close to the wide palette of the paintings to come. There is minor color blending and accenting with yellow in the water's background, teetering between two pairs of complementary colors presented by Chevreul and Rood: blue and orange and yellow and violet. While the colors do not have the desired calming effect that Seurat intended, they nonetheless show some development from the bichromatic Figures on the Shore, painted just months earlier.
The spacing between the studies averaged approximately one month, allowing sufficient time for Seurat to complete the painting as well as revisit it for self-evaluation. Two years after reading Rood's publication, he had been able to experiment with color juxtaposition for some time. Maybe he hesitated to employ it in his first few studies in favor of a hasty portrayal of the sun-lit bank of the Island of the Grande Jatte. However, if the final composition in this series was to use the pointillist technique, it had to surface at some point for practice. For ten drawings and paintings, he timidly (or unknowingly) painted the same scenes, unembellished by his characteristic splashes of unnatural color. Finally, in 1884, one year after his first study and three years after his scientific research, a painting surfaced that marked the transition of Seurat's style: Sailboat (1884). Sailboat captures the dotted brushstroke appearance so familiar to us today, in addition to incorporating cobalt blues and bright pinks into the shadowed grass. In this example, Seurat used blue in the shadows of the trees to make the illuminated areas appear more sunset-orange. While viewing this painting, the audience practically feels the warmth of the sun, a result of this pair of colors. The pink, which is actually a light shade of red, directly contrasts with the green grass, conveying the peacefulness of the figures relaxing in the shade. Seurat undeniably employed Chevreul's law of juxtaposed complementary colors to achieve this sense of calm, which he continued to do throughout the rest of his preparation studies.
Seurat's last great turning point leading up to the masterpiece can sometimes be mistaken for the final copy, but only if the viewer is unfamiliar with the painting from close proximity. The compositional study for La Grande Jatte served as Seurat's rough draft for his mammoth undertaking. Its layout anticipates the final copy almost without exception and the only variance is the style of brushstroke. It seems that Seurat settled back into a cross-hatch haphazard application of paint, reminiscent of Impressionist artwork. However, we all know that Seurat was far from a haphazard character and such a method of paint application would not conform to his systematic color application scheme. While he succesfully introduces blues and pinks into the green grass, just like he did in Sailboat, and blues into the orange parasols, he does not capture the full calming effect of contrasting colors because the brushstrokes are so large that they overwhelm the image. As Chevreul and Rood both set forth in their books, the complementary colors must be contrasted abruptly or very near each other, for the pleasing sensation to take effect. The cross-hatching allows for significant blending on the canvas, and not in the eye.
In order to evaluate Seurat's understanding and application of nineteenth century color theory, we must first become familiar with his contemporaries' actual scientific findings. In an 1890 letter to journalist Felix Fénéon, Seurat credited his thorough understanding of optics to a variety of sources, such as ancient Greek art, Monet and Pissarro's paintings, and essays by Charles Blanc, Delacroix, Chevreul, and Rood (Herbert 270). While all of these inspirations undoubtedly affected his work, Seurat owes most of his technological expertise to his contemporaries Ogden Rood and Michel Eugène Chevreul, who were indisputably the authorities on color optics in the nineteenth century (Gage 448). The first of the two scientists to publish his findings, Chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul boldly set specific laws on the way colors must interact in the eye and brain when perceived at a given distance. In 1839, he systematically presented his work in a report titled, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts. The section to which Seurat probably paid the closest attention examines the harmony of juxtaposed complementary colors. Chevreul's studies confirm the well-known artistic phenomenon of balancing the complementary colors red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and violet, but he continues to uncharted territory by proposing that combinations of these opposing colors naturally appear pleasing to the eye (Chevreul 75). Unrivaled by scientists of equal caliber, Chevreul remained the authority in optical phenomena until the late nineteenth century.
