National Gallery, London
Seurat was a friend of the French Impressionist painters. He had a theory that all colour was made up of lots of colours which were sorted out when light passed into the eye. He experimented with colour by painting in tiny dots. His style of painting is called Pointillism. This large painting took a long time to do. Even though it is an outdoor scene with lots of figures, it is very still, as if time has stopped. When the painting is looked at closely, it can be seen that even the parts that seem white or black are made of hundreds of tiny dots of colour.