A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

History

Seurat spent two years on it, making dozens of drawings and oil sketches of Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine. He built the picture from small dots and dashes of unmixed colour, meant to blend in the eye rather than on the palette, a method later called pointillism. It caused a stir at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886. Around 1889 he added the border of painted dots round the edge. Frederic Clay Bartlett bought it in 1924, and it has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1926.