SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF LA GRANDE JATTE is made by Georges Seurat(1859-1891).

 Georges Seurat (suh RAH) was born in Paris and studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts when he was eighteen years old. He studied there for two years and then spent some time in the military.

He studied Impressionism, but thought he could improve on the methods artists of that time were using. He spent his lifetime studying color and color theory. He devised a method of painting which used dots of paint instead of using longer brush strokes to create the picture. If you look at his paintings up closely all you see are dots, but when you move away from the painting, your eyes form the dots into a picture. In some of his later works he began to incorporate a few lines and strokes into his paintings.

If you were to look at a newspaper with a magnifying glass you would only see dots, but when you take away the glass, your eyes make the dots into a picture. You can visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to explore this idea of "dots which make pictures." They even mention Seurat and his method in the article.

His method became known as "pointillism" or "divisionism". In 1881 he visited the island of La Grande Jatte( la grahnd zhot) which inspired many of his future works. The featured work ; "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, was a very large painting. Before he started working on it he made more than 200 sketches in preparation for painting it.

In his lifetime he completed seven very large paintings and about 500 smaller ones. He worked to the point of exhaustion. While he was organizing an exhibit in 1891 he became ill and died. He was only thirty-one years old.

He was secretive about his private life. It was not until after his death that people found out he had a mistress and a child.