ABSTRACT
Poised directly above the emphatic contour that divides the shadowed foreground of Georges Seurat’s Un Dimanche à La Grande Jatte (Plate 31) from the sunny river bank beyond – and suspended midway between the seated woman sewing on the left and the white-frocked child and her mother standing in the center – is a flying orange insect (Plate 32). Highly saturated in color, its flattened form clings tenaciously to the painting’s surface, providing a warm grace note within the yellow-green grass. A hybrid configuration – part butterfly, part dragonfly – both its shape and structure almost exactly replicate James McNeill Whistler’s eccentric signature, which by the 1880s had become synonymous with his persona as both artist-flâneur and dandy. Moreover, Whistler’s idiosyncratic monogram was on prominent display in Paris at the Salon of 1884, clearly outlined and positioned to the left of the figure in Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-73) (Plates 33 and 34) that was exhibited there the year Seurat began work on La Grande Jatte.1
