A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte took Georges Seurat two years of methodical work, and its first exhibition astonished even his fellow Impressionists. The canvas builds a lazy summer Sunday on the Seine from hundreds of thousands of tiny separate strokes of pure colour, fused by the eye rather than mixed on the palette. Completed in 1886 as the founding statement of Neo-Impressionism, it stands among the most influential pictures of the nineteenth century. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.