Georges Seurat

Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.

That's the same island from the enormous Sunday-crowd picture everyone knows — he kept going back to it. The dots supposedly weren't just a look: he'd been reading up on how colours mix in your eye instead of on the palette, and a handful of other painters ran with the idea until it was a whole movement with a name.

The tower was brand new when this was painted, and a good chunk of Paris couldn't stand it — a few hundred writers and architects signed an open letter calling it a monstrosity, and the whole thing was only meant to stand about twenty years. Worth knowing this is a tiny painting too, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, according to what I could find.