A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Georges-Pierre Seurat took two years to complete this painting. Why so long? He used a technique called pointillism, painting dots that, from a distance, blend into the desired color. This painting is one of the most famous examples of pointillism. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones. Pointillism is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. The term itself was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of Seurat and Paul Signac. This painting consists of about 3,456,000 dots.