210not3b

Lecture Notes --Unit Three

Part Two

In 1984 Clark argued that the Grande Jatte quite definitely visualizes differences of class, showing worker and bourgeois sharing the same pleasures, most vividly in the group of three in the painting's lower-left corner. For Clark, recognizing and picturing social distinctions in this fashion is one of the unique features of Seurat's picture and marks the artist's salutary departure from the mythologizing, evasive , and even duplicitous images of the later nineteenth-century modernism.

S. Hollis Clayson

"The Family and the Father: The Grande Jatte and its Absences"

Certain aspects of the social context for the Grande Jatte are difficult to talk about without referring to certain cultural and institutional influences. For example, as Rybczinski has pointed out, Seurat and many of his contemporaries were fascinated with the "nature of popular leisure." But this fascination also led to the formation of a school of painting formed around this subject matter, that is, images of people at play. As House tells us, "Many of the [Grande Jatte's] themes were common in salon paintings by the mid-1880's" (117). (These themes will be explored in Unit Four.)

How these two contexts, the cultural and the institutional, relate to the social context is in the way they draw our attention to the subject matter of the painting, that is, to the people who Seurat captured on canvas--

Salon paintings of the same era as the Grande Jatte deploy a consistent repertory of devices to convey their messages....The prime characteristic of these Salon paintings is their legibility, achieved by a number of means: by titles, by the identifiability of the types of people depicted and the setting in which they are placed, by details of gesture and physiognomy that reveal the nature of the interchange between people, and by the coherence of the figure groupings, organized so that the focus of attention is readily apparent (117).

What can we learn, through these "means," about the folk of 1886 Paris? What can we learn, with the help of Rybczynski and House and others, from the visual representation of these people found in the Grande Jatte? First, let us be clear on what social classes are represented in the painting. "In Seurat's painting we see not workers but members of the bourgeoisie and the demimonde (119)," that is, the middle class and those who aspired to be mistaken for the upper class.

Representations of Gender

So let us begin with the woman seated with the two men in the lower left hand corner of the picture. A journal entry from 1879, by the painter Marie Bashkirsteff, may give us an insight into this woman's thoughts--

What I so want is my freedom to walk about all on my own.....I'll dress up in bourgeois clothes and a wig; I'll make myself so ugly that I will be as free as a man. That's the freedom I lack, without which one can never seriously make something of oneself....But even if I disguised myself and made myself ugly, I would only be half free, and any woman who goes out on her own is committing an imprudence (quoted in House 120).

Although it is slightly ambiguous as to which man this woman is with, she can still represent the reluctance women had to be seen in public alone because of the belief many men had that unaccompanied women were, at the least, of loose morals, and at the worst, prostitutes (120). (Although we shouldn't forget that certain accompanied women might also be paid for their company--see below.) Note that all the adult women in the Grande Jatte are safely paired with someone--other women, a child, or a man. But then so too are all but three or four men. Clearly, being seen in public by oneself in the 1880's signaled some sort of deficiency or deviancy.

The issue of class was initially discussed in Rybczinski's remarks on the pursuit of leisure, particularly the mixing of the classes. Rybczinski's conclusions are, in part, based on the inclusion in the painting of various representatives of particular social roles--soldiers, shop girls, factory worker, musician, etc. But there is another social role represented in the painting whose presence may be even more telling than that of the others--that is the role of the prostitute.

Representations of Social Roles

Seurat has given the viewer clues as to the identity of two of the women portrayed in the painting. The woman usually remarked upon is the one in the foreground with the monkey. Seurat's use of the monkey is generally considered to be the same as that found in several other paintings from this era, that is, that the woman found on the other end of the leash is a "tart" (123-4).

But another woman in the painting is identified as a prostitute through a visual pun that was also very common in paintings of this era. This is the woman, dressed in red(!), standing on the bank of the Seine with a fishing pole. As House tells us--

[Another painting], from the 1886 Salon, makes overt reference to demimonde recreation, with the woman's coquettish smile and the reference to the pun in French on pecher (to fish) [with circumflex over the e] and pecher (to sin) [with accent grave over the e] which, as Richard Thompson has pointed out, was common currency at the time. Comparable figures appear in the Grand Jatte; the woman with the fishing rod at the far left....(121).

There are other social roles represented in the painting, roles peculiar to Seurat's time. One is the wet nurse, identified by her "headdress," appearing left of center, a few feet to the right of the woman fishing. While most paintings of wet nurses showed them from the front with babies somewhere on there lap or bosom, it is interesting that Seurat chose to show her from the back and sitting next to an old woman.

But what exactly is a wet nurse? Quite simply, she was a woman who was hired to breast feed another woman's baby. Women of the upper class considered breast feeding to be undignified, so wet nurses were employed to provide care and sustenance to infants. This is not a social role common today in our culture, but in Seurat's time it was considered a legitimate, if lower class, way of earning a living. However, it is still interesting to wonder about Seurat's choice of how to portray this nurse and who he chooses to group her with.

Representations of Conspicuous Consumption

While the most obvious information we can gain through a "social" reading of this painting concerns fashion--this was indeed what people wore in the France of 1886--many other paintings from this era can give us the same information. What aspect, then, of the social context can Seurat's painting give us that other paintings don't? Probably the most unique to Seurat is the visual portrayal of the division between the demimonde/bourgeoisie and the affluent upper class, the class represented solely through the figures shown engaged in boating activities.

Except for the ferry boat (the larger boat with smokestacks), all the activity on the water, offshore and away from the Grande Jatte itself, is that associated with the upper classes. The sailboats represent the pastime of yachting which has already been identified by Rybczynski with the monied class. As we recall--

The pastime of yachting, which grew in popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century, was ideally suited to conspicuous consumption....[i]t was--and remains-- a gratifying opportunity to be seen, admired, and envied by the plebeians on the shore (102).

Although Rybczynski does not make the connection, it is interesting to note that many of the figures on the island do appear to be gazing out at the activities on the water, playing the role of the plebeians of which Rybcziynski speaks. (A closer look at the details of these activities can be found on the Hermeneutical Circle page.)

A second boating activity portrayed in the painting is that of rowing or sculling, represented by the four rowers and the coxswain energetically making their way down the Seine (one of the few ongoing physical movements frozen in time through an act of the artist). Sculling was (and is) an activity mostly confined to affluent students who are members of their high priced college or university rowing team or to affluent men who are members of exclusive men's clubs which "field" rowing teams.

As we recall, the rational recreation movement attempted to bring various classes into contact with each other. On the surface, Seurat certainly seems to be acknowledging this movement by appearing to portray an example of its success. But a closer look may warn us against such a happy, idyllic interpretation. Rather, Seurat may be (and many art critics and historians conjecture that he is) subtly signaling to the viewer (among other things) that, even when sharing the same public space, the classes still maintain their separateness, each serving the same social function in relation to the other which they always have.

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