A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

This is a very large painting, about ten feet wide, made with oil paint on canvas. It shows people of every age and social class on the banks of the River Seine. Together they fill a green, tree-shaded stretch of shore, some standing, some sitting, some strolling. A woman with children is among them, and there are dogs and a monkey on a leash. Sailing boats sit out on the water. The scene is calm and orderly, and the figures look almost still, as if the whole afternoon has paused for a moment.

Step close and the figures break apart. Up close you see small dots and dashes of colors that sit opposite each other on the color wheel, laid side by side. This is the pointillist technique, named for the points of paint. Then look for the monkey on a leash. It seems so natural in the scene that it is hard to imagine the picture without it. Now try something harder: find the man carrying a rolled newspaper in the far distance. He is barely noticeable, and he was one of the figures added later.

Georges Seurat, a French artist who lived from 1859 to 1891, painted this work between 1884 and 1886. He did not simply start on the big canvas. Many smaller painted and drawn sketches came first, along with several larger canvases where he worked out the landscape and the placement of the figures. After two years, he returned to the painting. He strengthened the outlines of some figures and added new ones. The border around the picture came later still, added in 1888 and 1889.

Seurat wanted to make a painting of modern life that could stand beside a classical Greek frieze. A frieze is a band of sculpted figures, often running along the top of an ancient building. That aim explains why every choice mattered to him, even the tiniest added figure. The painting arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924 and has held visitors ever since. It even appears in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where a character stares at it intently. Look a little longer at the figures themselves, and see how each seems fixed in place.