A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in 1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.Seurat's use of this highly systematic and" scientific" technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists.