Georges Seurat
French, 1859­1891
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884
1884­86
Oil on canvas
207.6 x 308 cm
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224

It took the French artist Seurat two years to complete this painting of a relaxed summer day in a park. The artist used very small brush strokes to cover this large canvas with tiny spots of color. This method was called “pointillism.” The grass in the park looks green—but if you look at one of the details of the lawn, you can see that it is made of separate spots of color, orange and blue along with green. At a distance, these different colors merge in your eye to appear as green. How many animals do you see? Where is the butterfly?