Tag Archives: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Ernest Bloch’s quote about ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ is just glorious.

I’ve never read a more vivid and correct description of a painting:

‘This picture is one single mosaic of boredom, a masterful rendering of the disappointed longing and the incongruities of a dolce far niente [idleness] …. The painting depicts a middle-class Sunday morning on an island in the Seine near Paris. Despite the recreation going on there, it seems to belong more to Hades than to a Sunday. The result is endless boredom, the little man’s hellish utopia of skirting the Sabbath and holding onto it too; his Sunday succeeds only as a bothersome must, not as a brief taste of the Promised Land.’

Brilliant.

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