Northwest of Paris you can find a famous river island within the Seine, the Île de la Grande Jatte. It partially belongs to Levallois-Perret and to Neuilly-sur-Seine and is today a nice residential area reachable via different bridges – but in earlier days it looked completely different. In 1818 the Duke of Orléans bought the island as a new home, created a park and his family was also the sponsor of the Temple de l’amour which you can find today at the southern end of the island. By that time the island was only accessible by boat and different painters went there to create artworks well-known today.
I’ve seen the Île de la Grande Jatte multiple times in museums around the world through the paintings of impressionists like Claude Monet (‘Les rives de la Seine, île de la Grande Jatte’, Musée Marmottan Monet; ‘Printemps à l’Île de la Grande Jatte’, Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design Oslo), Georges Seurat (‘La Seine à Courbevoie ou Paysage à la tourelle‘, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; ‘Temps gris, Grande-Jatte’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; ‘La Seine à la Grande Jatte’, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique), Vincent van Gogh (‘La Seine et le pont de la Grande Jatte’, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam) and Alfred Sisley (‘L’Île de la Grande Jatte’, Musée d’Orsay). The most iconic work about the island is Georges Seurats ‘Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte‘.
Today a four kilometers long hiking paths leads you around the Île de la Grande Jatte and shows you where these works have been painted. The island can be best accessed from the final stop of the metro line 3, Pont de Levallois Bécon – some meters to the west you can find the passerelle piétonne de l’île de la Jatte; a pedestrian bridge. If you are interested in impressionism in general: the iconic work creating the name for this art movement (Claude Monets ‘Impression – soleil levant‘) can be found at the Musée Marmottan Monet not too far away, east of the Bois du Bologne.
Île de la Grande Jatte
Neuilly/Levallois
Paris
France
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