Lady with a Monkey by Georges Seurat

This is a synthesis of countless studies and drawings Seurat made for the figure of the woman in the right foreground of La Grande Jatte.

In some places, the brush barely touched the panel. The artist's chief interest is concentrated on the black in the lady's jacket, the diagonal of the parasol contrasting with the rigorous vertical of her profile, and the perspective of trees. A distinctive feature of this painting is that it looks like a sketch, and shows no trace of the work already devoted to this motif. The underlying plastic considerations can only be guessed at.

The artist, while composing in contemporary fashion, succeeds in going beyond it, and integrates it in his own order. Paul Signac wrote:

A derby hat by Degas is never ridiculous. It achieves style by its pictorial quality. The hats by Dagnan-Bouveret [ an academic painter of the period] make us laugh."

Similarly, Seurat repudiated the picturesque. Everything he paints takes on his style.

Charles Angrand, who watched him at work on the island of La Grande Jatte, says "Laying out his palette, Seurat always observed this order: three squeezed-out strips of white pigment near the thumb, each to be mixed with one of the primary colors red, yellow, and blue."

In the definitive version of La Grande Jatte, Seurat added a man in a top hat behind the woman with the monkey.