Description
Gray Weather, Grande Jatte – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
This is the island from Seurat’s most famous picture, painted with nobody on it. Among our paintings on canvas it is one of the quietest: river, grass and trees under an overcast sky, and not a single Sunday figure. The original is held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The view sits low, close to the water. A grassy bank fills the foreground in cool greens and ochres, the Seine lies flat across the middle, and on the far side a line of trees closes into a single darker band. The sky takes the top third and is pale and even, sunless, with only the faintest warmth in it. There is no shadow to point at anything and no figure to lead the eye. The picture is made of light and water and nothing else.
The proof that the method is not a sunlight trick
Seurat’s colour is mixed in the viewer’s eye rather than on the palette. In sunlight that produces the shimmer everyone remembers. Under cloud it has to do something harder: the grey here is not one colour but a dense mesh of blue, green and rose dots cancelling into a still light. That is why the overcast pictures are the better evidence for the technique — if it works without sun, it is a way of building colour, not a way of painting weather.
An island the crowd has left
La Grande Jatte is an island in the Seine at Neuilly where Parisians walked on Sundays. Seurat painted it repeatedly, and in most of those canvases there is no one there at all. This is the place itself, seen by a painter who went out to work rather than to promenade. Beside the great Sunday composition it reads almost as a rehearsal room: the same bank, the same trees, the same water, with the performance removed.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas, painted about 1886–88, and belongs to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, accession 2002.62.3, from the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection. We state width first and then height, and the table below gives the measurements in that order. The painting is made by our painter by hand, oil on canvas, in the size you choose and to your own measurements if you prefer. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the picture for approval before it leaves the studio. You choose the frame in our 3D application. Every artwork we sell is hand-painted and never printed.
This shelf also carries the great Sunday composition, in which the same island is full of people, and the same river a few kilometres downstream at Courbevoie.
