A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat, 1886)

Georges Seurat spent more than 2 years (1884-1886) painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, developing the technique of Pointillism to do so. The 205 x 305 cm oil painting consists of approximately 3.5 million individual dots of colour applied in a precise grid pattern to create optical blending. Now at the Art Institute of Chicago, it inspired the 1984 Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George and has been analyzed as one of the most technically complex paintings ever created.