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Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6) depicts a busy park filled with visitors. A masterpiece of Pointillist technique, Seurat spent over two years working on it, painstakingly rendering the scene in tiny dots of color.
In the background a man is playing a musical instrument. All online sources call it a bugle, but in a large reproduction I once owned it clearly looked like a hunting horn to my eyes. I also seem to remember when looking at it “in the flesh” at the Chicago Art Institute that it was a horn… but maybe this is my own wishful thinking.
The detail at left is not too clear, but it is the best I could find online. At right is my interpretation.
I believe the mistake that people might be making is in interpreting one of the heads of a couple in the far background as a bugle bell. The “true” bell is actually located between the player’s two hands, suggesting that he is holding a hunting horn parallel to the ground.
A trivial thing I know, but I am curious…can anyone else confirm or deny this as a hunting horn?
