Georges Seurat: Greek Antiquity at the Service of the Modern Republic
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
In the France of the 1880s, the very young Third Republic sought to establish its legitimacy by forging new cultural and social landmarks.
For his part, Georges Seurat seized upon contemporary themes related to modern urban leisure.
However, he may have drawn inspiration from ancient art—more specifically, the Parthenon friezes —and, if so, he was giving his work a political meaning. This study was conducted by Michael Zimmermann.
The Intellectual Heritage of the Beaux-Arts: From Political Liberty to Aesthetic Perfection
There exists a kind of genealogy of French admiration for the Parthenon frieze, sculpted by Phidias.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Antoine de Quatremère de Quincy, Secretary of the Beaux-Arts, postulated that there is a consubstantiality between great art and a regime of liberty; in other words, that artistic perfection can only blossom in a society enjoying a certain political autonomy—a primarily intellectual reflection coming from a man with a limited revolutionary past and a partisan of the monarchist restoration. The fact remains that according to these terms, the splendor of Athenian masterpieces is to be linked to Athenian democracy.
Charles Blanc, twice Director of the Beaux-Arts and an influential theorist, adhered to a similar approach. The beauty of ancient marbles resided in the fact that their patrons were free citizens, echoing Quatremère’s ideas.
The frieze thus established itself as an academic aesthetic canon, yet one not detached from a political framework.
Politicisation Through the Teaching of Hippolyte Taine
Now, Seurat—of whom it has been said that A Sunday was a precursor to modernism and abstraction, for whom the subject was merely a pretext—had perhaps, because he gave his Sunday strollers the appearance of an Athenian procession, wished to transmit a political message.
Hippolyte Taine was still teaching at the Beaux-Arts when Seurat studied there in 1878-1879. Now, what did he say of the frieze? That it is the expression of the golden age of Athenian democracy.
His argument, however, was not strictly historical. The historian actually projected the imagery of the French Revolution onto ancient Athens—an anachronism at the service of the Revolution.
The frieze by Phidias was then perceived as the idyllic celebration of a pacified social contract, where the Festival of the Federation of 1790 would find its distant ancient mirror. The Athenian frieze is a symbol of union between social classes, such as it was established under the French Revolution.
Application to Seurat: A Contemporary Social Frieze
Nourished by these precepts, Seurat aspired to create the image of a modern political idyll. He confided to Gustave Kahn his desire to make his contemporaries file past with the same solemnity as the participants in the Panathenaea, by orchestrating a strict harmony between the lines and colors of his canvases.
In A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Seurat staged the famous new social classes arising from Gambetta’s Republic.
He borrowed the hieratic characteristic of the compositions of Puvis de Chavannes, such as in Doux Pays or Sacred Wood. And if it is a kind of modern procession on the model of the ancient Panathenaea, the painting would be a celebration of this new republic, whose constitutional laws had been established for only a few years.
This analysis of A Sunday allows for a reconsideration of Seurat’s landmark painting not merely as a pretext for painting—which serves the modernist discourse of the 20th century—but to restore to it a political dimension, knowing that contemporary commentaries had noted its character as a social frieze as well as its very Athenian hieratic nature.
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