By turns scientist and anthropologist, Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in the pointillist style, designed to separate the colors presented to the eye to create a truer impression of light. Seurat hoped to raise the painting’s subjects, its now-famous citizens of leisure, to the status of icons—as he described to the French poet Gustave Kahn, “The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.”
