“From Imitation to Evolution”: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on Georges Seurat’s "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884"

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

Georges Seurat’s masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884, is the kind of painting that has become so ubiquitous it almost disappears into itself, but within this busy scene of curiously automata-like human interaction lie many clues to the transformations of the period. For one, this picture manifests a shift in thinking from imitation to civilization, mimesis to evolution, insofar as it encapsulates Darwin’s theories of natural selection and their ramifications for the understanding of human psychology at the time.