The border of coloured dots around A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is not the frame. It is paint, added two or three years after the picture was finished, and putting it there cost Seurat the frame he had actually chosen. The canvas came off its stretcher to make room.
Two years on the island, and a white frame
Seurat worked on the picture from 1884 to 1886, going out to the island in the Seine on weekday mornings to draw and building the canvas up in the studio from small strokes of unmixed colour set side by side, so that the mixing happened in the eye. Finished, it was nearly ten feet across: 207.5 by 308.1 centimetres. He had read the colour theorist Eugène Chevreul at sixteen, and Chevreul told painters to choose their own frames. At twenty he saw the white frames at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition, and the impression stayed with him. Nobody photographed the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition of 1886, where La Grande Jatte first hung, but people who were there remembered white frames around his work.
The border that made the painting bigger
The dots came later. Only after finishing Models, in 1888, did Seurat start reworking the edges of pictures he had already declared done. La Grande Jatte was taken off its stretcher so that the tacking margins — the strip of canvas that had been folded round the wood — could be opened out, primed with lead white and painted with a border of red, orange and blue dots. The painting grew by the width of those margins. The frame he had chosen was then too small for it, and at some point around 1889 it disappeared. Seurat died in 1891, at thirty-one, without replacing it. The one part of the picture he treated as belonging to the painting is the one part nobody can reconstruct.
Seven frames and a best guess
What followed was a century of guessing. A photograph of the painter Lucie Cousturier, who owned it before it left France, has it hanging behind her unframed, flat against the wall. Seurat's mother kept it until she died; his brother let it go for eight hundred francs in 1900. In 1924 it went to Frederic Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett in Chicago for twenty thousand dollars, and in 1926 they gave it to the Art Institute. Bartlett designed its first museum frame himself. It was gilded for the 1933 World's Fair, given a Louis XVI reproduction in 1959 and a heavy white moulding in 1986. In March 2022 the museum finished another one, flat and bright white, after a year of work, and said in print what it was: a best guess.
Every frame since 1886 has been somebody's guess. The border of dots is the one he painted on himself, and it needs nothing built around it.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.