A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

The woman with the parasol on the right is walking a small monkey on a lead. In 1880s Parisian slang, singesse, a female monkey on a lead, was code for a prostitute. Seurat populated a respectable Sunday park with quietly encoded figures: the fishing rod held by another woman (pêcher, to fish, also to seek a man); the working-class man stretched in the foreground. The painting reads as morally neutral and is anything but. Now at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago @artinstitutechi