A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

Found on the island of La Grande Jatte, in the Seine, on an afternoon in 1884, and recorded in coloured dots: one woman with a monkey on a leash, the monkey arching its back, the woman upright under a black parasol with her bustle jutting behind her like a shelf. One gentleman beside her in a top hat, holding a cane, not holding her arm.

One man stretched on the grass in a sleeveless shirt, smoking a pipe, his back to everybody. One man in a top hat sitting near him, looking at the water. One woman between them with a fan. One black dog with its nose in the turf, sniffing for something the painter did not record. One small orange dog in the right corner, mid-leap, the only creature in the painting going anywhere fast.

One little girl in white standing in the exact middle, looking straight out, the only person who seems to have noticed us. One girl in orange running at the right, scolded in advance. One woman fishing at the bank. One horn player near the trees, cheeks presumably puffed, sound unrecorded. Several sailboats, one rowing crew, two far-off soldiers, and a man with a rolled newspaper in the farthest distance, so small you could spend a lifetime of Sundays without spotting him. Shadows: many, laid across the lawn in long dark bands. Sunlight: wherever the shadows are not.

Total: about three metres of canvas. Duration: two years, beginning in 1884, when Georges Seurat was twenty-four. Method: small strokes of unmixed colour set side by side, so that the eye of whoever stands back does the blending. He returned to the picture after a first finish, sharpening silhouettes and adding figures; the monkey looks like she was always there. He wanted modern Parisians to carry the composure of a classical frieze, and you can see it in the profiles. Nobody slouches who has not been told to.

Additions, later: a painted border of dots, 1888 to 1889, framing the park in its own colours.

Not recorded: noise. A crowd this size must have produced shouting, a crying baby, the horn. Seurat left all of it out, and what remains is an island holding its breath.

Missing: Seurat himself, who died in 1891 at thirty-one, decades before his Sunday reached Chicago in 1924.