Oil on Canvas, 1886
Georges Seurat

In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat used pointillism to depict people from different social classes strolling and relaxing in a park just west of Paris on La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine River. The painting is approximately 6.6 ft × 9.8 ft in size. Although he took his subject from modern life, Seurat sought to evoke the sense of timelessness associated with ancient art, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture. He once wrote, “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.