A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Judged on the configuration. The frame of the picture cannot go: the long diagonal of the shadow across the foreground, the light bank beyond it, the river at the left and the trees standing like columns. Certain figures are required. The couple in profile at the right are the picture’s façade, the bustle and the top hat its emblems, the monkey their comment. The man lying at the left balances them and belongs to another class. The mother and the girl in white at the centre are the one frontal pair, the axis the crowd turns on. The woman fishing at the river’s edge answers the couple. Beyond these the test gives: in the middle distance figures could be moved or taken away and the composition would rebalance, as the studies show it did more than once. The scale is compelled, a museum picture of a public. The armature and a dozen figures are necessary; the population is permitted.

Score: 8.4 / 10

What can be stated: the leisure of the modern city is a public order, regulated like work, in which classes share a space without meeting. No one speaks to anyone. Bourgeois couples, a man in a cap lying on the grass, soldiers, a nursemaid, rowers, children: each keeps to a place and a posture, and the day of rest is spent in display. The crowd is an aggregate of strangers. A second disclosure belongs to the method: the scene is made of separate touches that resolve only at a distance, as the crowd resolves into a society only when seen from outside it. Whether the picture satirises this or offers it as a modern Arcadia the canvas does not settle: the monkey and the stiff couple pull one way, the sunlight and the children the other. Held below the top because much of what it gives is a hush, a mood, and the meaning has to be argued from it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The elevation is real and of one kind: a solemn, arrested calm in full summer light, the hieratic made out of Sunday clothes. Its places: the mother and the girl at the centre, pale against the shadow; the line of figures in profile, still as a frieze; the bank of light beyond the shadow, where the grass glows; the river and its sails, opened at the left; and the air of the whole, a heat that has stopped time. Before the large canvas the strangeness becomes gravity. What holds it: one temperature and one hour, no terror, no transport of scale beyond the size of the canvas; and the stiffness that makes the gravity also makes some figures comic, which lowers the height of certain passages.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Myth evoked in the subject and partly built in the structure. Built: the frieze. Figures turned to strict profile or full face and set in parallel planes, the procession of the Parthenon and the registers of Egypt given to a Paris crowd; the structure is load-bearing, and it makes a Sunday into a rite. Evoked: Arcadia and the Golden Age, the classical pastoral as Puvis de Chavannes had renewed it, the island as a modern Elysium, the day of rest as a sabbath. The particular stays particular, as it must: bustles, parasols, a cornet player, a pug, a monkey, a steamboat. Held below the gate because the archetypes are named by the composition rather than enacted by it: there is no story, no figure who is more than a type, and the rite has no object beyond itself. The frieze carries the form; the myth it implies is a frame the viewer supplies.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is Impressionism at its height: the open-air scene of modern leisure painted quickly, in broken colour, to fix an instant of light. Seurat kept the subject and reversed every other term. The instant became permanence; the quick sketch became two years of studies; the small canvas painted on the spot became a three-metre composition built in the studio; the intuitive touch became a system of separate colours set side by side according to the optical theory of Chevreul and Rood, to be mixed in the eye; the passing figure became a figure fixed in profile like a frieze. The stake was large and was paid: a painter of about twenty-five put his whole method on one canvas, showed it at the last Impressionist exhibition over the objections of founders of the group, was mocked in the press, and did not sell it in his lifetime. Held a step below the top because the scandal it met was a smaller one.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The figures are still because they are built of touches: no stroke carries movement, so the crowd is frozen into a pattern, and the regulated leisure the picture shows is shown by the regularity of its making. The light vibrates because the colours are separate: the sun on the grass and the shadow under the trees are made of the same touches in different proportions, and the eye completes them. The size matters: at six square metres the touches resolve at the distance from which a viewer sees the whole crowd, and break up as the viewer comes close, as a crowd does. Paint it in Impressionist brushwork and it is another sunny afternoon; paint it small and it is a sketch. Held below the top because the surface is in two campaigns, the touches laid over an earlier brushed layer, which shows through in places.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: 140 years, and the questions are alive. Science or poetry: Félix Fénéon’s account of 1886, the codification in Paul Signac’s D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme of 1899 and William Innes Homer’s study of the method of 1964, against readings that find the system a pretext. Satire or utopia: Meyer Schapiro’s essay of the 1950s, T. J. Clark on the environs of Paris and the classes at leisure, Linda Nochlin’s reading of 1989 of the picture as an anti-utopian allegory. What some of the figures are, which stays open. Whether optical mixing happens at all as the theory claimed. What the altered colours were; the Art Institute’s study of 2004 reopened the making. Held below the top because the debate swings between two poles, satire and Arcadia, and the terms of the method are largely agreed.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of French painting of the 1880s and the avant-garde after it. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of colour and of the picture’s construction, the first canvas to apply a stated optical system at the scale of a history painting, and the founding work of a movement that Fénéon named in its first year, Neo-Impressionism. The discount: the school was soon codified and narrowed, and its reach in painting passed largely through Signac’s system rather than through the canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Signac, Pissarro for a time, Cross, Luce, Van Rysselberghe and the Belgians of Les XX, where it was shown in 1887; Van Gogh’s Paris canvases of 1887; Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904, out of which Fauvism came; the divisionism of the Italian Futurists, Delaunay and Mondrian’s early work; and, in public culture, Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George of 1984.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the composition, the figures and the method are whole and legible, and nothing of the image is lost. Presence: unsold in Seurat’s short life (he died in 1891), then in private hands, then continuously on view in Chicago since 1926. Fabric: here is the charge. The method is colour, its contrasts calculated, and part of the calculation is reported to have failed: a yellow in the sunlit grass and the lights is reported to have darkened toward olive and brown. The finding is given as reported. The form stays legible, so the charge falls on the fabric, the smallest kind, but it falls on what the method made the substance of the work. The surface is fixed to its year in fashion, and the crowd outlives it. The span, 140 years, sets the ceiling, and the colour takes a tenth or two from it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged as command of oil over six square metres, in a method of the painter’s own making. Load-bearing: the drawing first, a tonal structure built in the conté studies, where Seurat was a master of value without line; light set against dark at every edge, so that each figure is set off by a halo of contrast; the touches laid by complementary across the whole surface, varied in size to the object; the border, which carries the colour logic to the frame and closes the field. The finish is complete as few paintings of its size are. The costs: the scale of the figures does not agree with the perspective of the bank, so that some read too large or too small for their place, by design or not; the touches lie unevenly over the first campaign; and some profiles are stiff past the point of the frieze. Command at the top; the system, at moments, stronger than the scene.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the sails on the river at the far left, small and bright, and the bustle and top hat of the couple at the right, large and dark. They obey one law, announced on every part of the surface: each thing is made of separate touches of colour, lit by one sun, set off from its neighbour by contrast, placed on a plane parallel to the picture, turned in profile or full face. People, dogs, trees, grass, water, boats and the border itself are made under the same rule. The range is wide for one canvas: classes, ages, animals, the river’s traffic, sun and shade, the foreground and the far bank. What resists: the scale of the figures does not obey the space as strictly as their colour obeys the method, and the earlier brushed layer, where it shows, is of another law.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The orders held: the city’s classes together, a bourgeois in a top hat, a man in a cap at rest, soldiers, a nursemaid, rowers; the family, mothers and children; labour and its absence, Sunday as the release of workers and clerks; the state, in the soldiers’ uniforms; the natural order, in river, trees, grass and animals; the modern, in the steamboat and the fashions; and science, in the method itself. The frieze and the shadow integrate them, each order placed on the same ground. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no sacred order but the rite of rest, no history, and little consciousness, since the faces are hidden in profile or shadow and no figure can be said to think. The crowd is wide, and every person in it is a type.

Score: 7.9 / 10