Seated Woman with a Parasol (study for La Grande Jatte)

During 1884 and 1885, Georges Seurat was hard at work on the most ambitious painting of his career, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, now a centerpiece of the Art Institute’s collection of 19th-century French painting. The artist’s genesis of this large canvas involved many preparatory studies, which fall primarily into two groups: small compositional sketches and color studies on wooden panels, and nuanced Conté crayon drawings that explore both the empty landscape and the shapes of specific figures or figural groups. In this contemplative drawing, Seurat developed the expressive contours of the seated female figure holding a parasol that would ultimately occupy the center of the finished painting.