Seated Figures, Study for "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"

Seurat made roughly thirty oil studies in preparation for his enormous masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which he exhibited at the final impressionist exhibition in 1886. It depicts an array of bourgeois figures lounging on La Grande Jatte (The Big Bowl), an island in the Seine located just outside Paris. Studies such as this one focus on a select group of figures, and though they often depart from the finished composition, this scene’s trees, riverbed, and white umbrella do appear in the middle ground of the final painting. Seurat’s technique, in which he allowed the dark wood panel to show through in his oil studies, rather than covering it with a light white ground, distinguished his work from that of the impressionists, leading the critic Félix Fénéon to characterize his approach as “neoimpressionism.”