Full Scale Painting Homage Georges Seurat Sunday On La Grande Jatte 2013 82x122"

An extraordinary, full-scale painted stage backdrop created for the 2013 Princeton University production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George painted by Susan Donner.

This monumental work—measuring 82 by 122 inches, effectively mirroring the dimensions of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte—reimagines the painting through meticulous, hand-applied pointillist technique. The decision to work at essentially the same scale as Seurat’s original is both unusual and deeply considered: it allows the composition to command the stage—and now the room—with the same immersive, architectural presence intended in the nineteenth century.

Unlike the usual photographic and video enlargements commonly used as backdrops in stage design for Sondheim’s play, this work is a true painting on canvas—a rare artistic commitment that bridges fine art and theatre. Each dotted brushstroke painstakingly attempts to recreate the luminous harmony and quiet vitality of Seurat’s masterpiece, bringing the iconic artwork to the theatergoer as the visual touchstone of Sondheim’s meditation on art, perception, and creation.

What makes this piece especially compelling is how closely it aligns with the psychological and philosophical questions at the heart of Sondheim’s musical. Seurat’s composition is famously constructed so that no one appears to look at anyone else; each figure stands, sits, or strolls in a kind of self-contained bubble. They share space but not gaze. This was not an accident. The painting’s stillness and lack of interpersonal connection have long been read as a reflection of modern life—individuals existing side by side yet remaining emotionally apart.

Sondheim transforms this formal choice into the central dramatic engine of Sunday in the Park with George. The musical imagines the inner life of Seurat (here, “George”), an artist so attuned to seeing that he struggles to connect. The figures’ isolation becomes a metaphor for the artist’s own solitude: he observes everyone with extraordinary clarity but stands at a distance from them, translating their presence into points of color and structure rather than into relationships. The musical repeatedly asks what is gained and what is lost when an artist devotes himself completely to his work.

Within that framework, this painted backdrop is not merely illustrative scenery. At full Seurat scale, rendered in patient pointillism rather than mechanical reproduction, it embodies Sondheim’s themes: the painstaking labor of building a world “dot by dot,” the tension between the living people on stage and the stillness of the image behind them, and the quiet ache of a society in which no one quite manages to meet another’s gaze. The backdrop functions as both setting and argument—a visual thesis about isolation, attention, and the cost of seeing too much.

The work carries both theatrical and aesthetic provenance. It was created for a Princeton University production known for its fidelity to artistic detail and respect for the underlying art-historical material, and it was subsequently acquired privately in 2021 by its current owner. Displayed as a centerpiece, the painting easily escapes its origin as stage design: its monumental scale, disciplined surface, and layered narrative allow it to resonate as a collector’s statement or as a dramatic interior focal point that speaks simultaneously to art history, musical theatre, and the craft of painting.

Provenance
Princeton University Theatre Department, 2013 production of Sunday in the Park with George
Signed and Dated Susan Donner 2013
Acquired 2021, private collection