A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

In the pictureParisians sit or stand on the grassy riverbank. At the front right are a woman holding a parasol and a man in formal dress, with a monkey and a dog at their feet. On the left a man lies smoking, and in the middle a girl in white faces straight out. There are rowboats and sailboats on the river. Everything is made of small dots of color, so up close you see only dots, and from a distance they become a scene. It is a large work, 3 meters wide.

BackgroundSeurat painted it from 1884 to 1886. He took from scientific theory the method of not mixing colors on the palette but placing dots of pure color side by side so that they mix in the viewer's eye, and this painting was his first attempt at it on a large scale. When it hung in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, people laughed, but it became a milestone that showed where painting after Impressionism would go. The statue-like stiffness of the figures is also intentional.

Puzzle tipAs a puzzle, the pointillism makes all the pieces look alike when they are shown small, so zooming in is essential. Anchor the large figures first, such as the woman with the parasol, the man in formal dress and the girl in white, and divide the grass into sunlit areas (bright yellow-green) and shaded areas (dark blue-green). The river is painted in horizontal dabs and the grass in vertical ones, which tells them apart. It suits 300 pieces well, but takes time.