wordplay, the crossword column

One Side of Niagara Falls

Alex Eaton-Salners paints a lovely picture.

CreditMarcus Yam for The New York Times

TUESDAY PUZZLE — Under normal circumstances, when you stroll through a museum, the artwork is in plain sight.

Fortunately for us, this puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners does not constitute a normal circumstance. We’re going to have to look a little harder to enjoy the art in his puzzle, but it’s worth the effort, in my opinion. This is a multilayered adventure that even new solvers will find accessible, with something for everyone to enjoy.

And that, if you get my drift, is the whole point.

1A: The books of the Bible and their order are weak spots for me, but the crossings are kind, and that enabled me to get the answer ACTS.

27A: There’s a question mark here, so prepare to think outside the box. “What’s far from fair?” means that the clue wants you to think about what changes the word “fair” to “far.” The answer would be AN I.

30A: Read the clue carefully. “Counterpart of long.” has a period at the end, which clues typically do not have. That means that “long.” is an abbreviation (for “longitude”), and the counterpart of longitude is LATitude.

36A: Remember, foreign language in the clue means that the answer has to be in that language. “Dijon darling” is not someone who is really into mustard. Dijon is a city in France, so the clue is asking you to come up with the French word for “darling.” The answer is CHERIE.

67A: Wordplay alert! “Egg shell?” with that question mark is not the shell of an egg. It’s a bit stretchier than that: It’s the OVARY, which serves as an enclosure — or shell — for eggs.

12D: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but: Hi, kids! Joan JETT was one of the seminal female punk rockers, and I wanted to be her when I was a teen. She started out with The Runaways, but has fronted her own band, Joan JETT and the Blackhearts, for years. You probably know her from her hit “I Love Rock ‘n Roll”:

27D: Hi, kids, me again. Back when cartoons were really cartoons and we all thought that in just a few short years we’d be traveling via jet-packs, there was a cartoon called “The Jetsons.” It was basically “The Flintstones” (ask your folks), but set in the future. Anyway, they had a dog called ASTRO, who was a combination of the Flintstones’ Dino and Scooby Doo (they tended to recycle ideas a lot in the 1960s, because really, who could be bothered?).

61D: “Cover of night?” usually means that something can’t be seen because it is dark outside, but with that question mark, we are supposed to be thinking about a different kind of cover. It’s not a blanket, but pajamas (PJS) that cover your body.

There is a lot going on here for a Tuesday puzzle, but it emerges slowly and offers solvers a very nice “Aha!” moment.

The first thing you might have noticed is that there are dots in some of the squares of the grid. I mention this because I wanted to let you know that they are supposed to be there and that it is not schmutz on your screen or your print copy.

It might not be apparent at first, but we are gazing at the famous painting by GEORGES SEURAT called “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Seurat, who was a master of the painting technique called POINTILLISM, worked and reworked the oil sketches and preliminary drawings to refine the blending of color using tiny dabs of paint with scientific precision. This technique allowed him to tackle issues like light and form.

[To learn more about Seurat’s masterpiece, watch this video from the Khan Academy.]

But what are those dots in the grid? Mr. Eaton-Salners is making a point here (sorry). If you read the letters in each of the dotted squares from top to bottom, they spell out the name of the painting.

And although Seurat painted this incredible work of art 135 years ago, he and his technique both make their debuts in the New York Times Crossword with this puzzle.

Clocking in at 42 letters, I believe “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is one of the longest nonquote word strings to ever appear in a daily New York Times Crossword puzzle. Evenly spreading it out over the entire grid to simulate pointillism, while maintaining the best fill possible, required several nonstandard constraints and techniques.

First, I spaced out the “letter dots” so that no two dots were orthogonally adjacent. I initially tried to avoid diagonal adjacency too, but that proved too constraining on the surrounding fill. Spacing out the dots in this way gives the grid a more uniform and aesthetically pleasing pattern.

Second, I intersected parts of the painting’s name with POINTILLISM and GEORGES SEURAT, which I also had to keep away from the top, the bottom, and each other. The result: 14 dots before either word, two dots in POINTILLISM, 15 dots between the two, 3 dots in GEORGES SEURAT and eight dots afterward.

Third, I placed letter dots in positions where the fill would be least constrained. For example, the J in JATTE is placed in the lower-left corner where it is relatively isolated from other letter dots and starts a five letter horizontal word. In English, J is much more common at the start of words than in other positions. Based on XWord Info’s word list, there are 317 valid strings with a J as the first letter of a 5-letter word, versus 27, 84, 48, and nine valid strings when the J is in the other positions. Since the title unfolds top-to-bottom in a fixed order, I had much more control over horizontal placement than vertical placement. For example. after the J I had to work in four more letters, which limits how high or low it can be positioned.

Almost finished solving but need a bit more help? We’ve got you covered.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead, but subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.

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Your thoughts?

Deb Amlen is the crossword columnist. She has been writing the Wordplay column since 2011 and believes that everyone can learn to solve the Times crossword. Even the Saturdays. @NYTimesWordplay