A Sunday Afternoon in Central Park

Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States, laid out on 843 acres of rock and swamp from a plan Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won in 1858. By the 1890s it was finished and the city had grown up around it, the Dakota standing over the West Side. Sunday was the one day the city had off, and on a fine one the lawns by the Lake filled with nursemaids, clerks, families and men who had dressed for church and stayed dressed.

Georges Seurat painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte between 1884 and 1886; it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago and is just over ten feet wide. He built it from thousands of small dots of unmixed color, meant to blend in the eye rather than on the palette, and posed his Parisians in strict profile and full face so that a day off looks as solemn as a frieze.

The Seine becomes the Lake and the far bank a row of tall apartment houses. Seurat's couple move to the center, she under a white parasol, he in a top hat with a cane, a girl in white beside them. A nurse pushes a wicker pram at the left, two boys roll hoops, a pair sits on a green bench. In the blue shade of the foreground a man in a straw boater lies back beside a woman bent over her sewing, and a small terrier trots across the grass toward the light.

Seurat froze a Paris crowd into something permanent. Moved here, the stillness reads as a city catching its breath, one afternoon a week, on ground it set aside for exactly that.