The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 5.51 cm above, 6.34 cm below.
- 100 × 70 cm sheet
- A 100 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 28 in. Margins 10.59 cm each side, 8.00 cm above, 9.19 cm below — wider than usual at the sides, and the reason is given below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 27.54 cm for the small sheet, 78.23 × 52.21 cm for the large one. Keep the painted border inside the window — it is part of the picture. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891), A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, 1884–86, border added 1888–89
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 207.5 × 308.1 cm. Inscribed lower right: Seurat
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
- Inventory
- 1926.224
- Rights
- CC0 — the museum places both the work and its photograph in the public domain
- File
- Art Institute of Chicago, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint, border included, runs to all four edges of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
The picture Seurat made
A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine at the edge of Paris. People of every age and class sit, lie and stroll in the shade: a man with a pipe stretched out on the grass, a woman fishing, a nurse, soldiers, a girl running, and on the right a couple in their Sunday best with a monkey on a leash and a pug running ahead of them. Boats move on the water beyond.
Come close and it all dissolves into small dots and dashes of complementary colour laid side by side, which the eye mixes back together at a distance. Many painted and drawn studies led up to the canvas. Two years after he began, Seurat returned to it, strengthened the outlines of some figures and added others. Some, like the monkey, are hard to imagine away; others, like the man with a rolled newspaper far in the distance, are barely noticeable. Seurat wanted a painting of modern life with the composure of a classical frieze. Later still, in 1888–89, he painted a border of dots around the whole picture.
May 1886, and after
The canvas was shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, at the Maison Dorée on rue Laffitte in May 1886, then at the Indépendants that summer and with Les XX in Brussels in 1887. The Art Institute dates its arrival in Chicago to 1924, and visitors have been standing in front of it ever since — Cameron among them, in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which the museum likes to mention too.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.26×
The canvas is more than three metres wide. The museum's file is 9,310 × 6,237 px: at original size that is 30.22 px/cm, or 77 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet. At our floor of 300 dpi the file carries 78.83 cm of width, 0.26× the canvas. That is exactly what the 100 × 70 cm sheet prints, one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print. Our house rule would have put the image at 84 cm; the file does not reach it, so the file wins and the side margins come out wider. We would rather show you white paper than interpolated dots, least of all in a painting made of dots.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.14× original, with 563 dpi available. At that size the dots merge completely. On the large sheet you begin to see them.
One small wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.4927, the catalogued dimensions give 1.4848, which is 0.53 % apart. Anchored on the width, the photograph shows 206.4 cm of height against the catalogued 207.5. The likeliest explanation is the frame rebate covering a few millimetres at top and bottom, but that is a supposition, not a measurement, and we do not stretch the file to close the gap.
What we measured at the edges
Forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in. Medians: top 81 and 88, bottom 102 and 104, left 104 and 101, right 102 and 102. The values scatter widely from sample to sample, as a painted border of coloured dots should. There is no photographer's backdrop in the file and nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Seurat died on 29 March 1891, aged thirty-one. The painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1962, and in the United States as a work exhibited in 1886. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes the object under CC0 and serves the full-resolution file openly through its IIIF endpoint. The film is mentioned only as a fact about the painting; nothing from it is reproduced. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States. Clear in all four.
A note on colour
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 161 px: 93.9 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that warm tones account for 39.4 %, green 27.9 %, blue 26.3 %, violet 6.4 %. No single band reaches the 60 % our colour collections require. That is the point of the technique: every colour sits next to its opposite.