Georges Seurat was an important French artist best known as the creator of Pointillism. He employed dots of complementary colors next to one another to create vibrating scenes from everyday life. The artist’s most iconic work is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), a large-scale painting portraying the bourgeoisie having a leisurely day by the river. “Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of color, and of line, conditioned by the dominant key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations,” Seurat once explained. Born on December 2, 1859 in Paris, France, Seurat first pursued art at the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied under Henri Lehmann, a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In the early 1880s, the artist read several texts on color theory and optics that would inform his own technique, including Michel Eugène Chevreul’s The Laws of Contrast of Color (1839). Working from both drawings and oil studies done en plein air, Seurat’s cerebral approach to color was a unique branch of the many iterations of Neo-Impressionism, and influenced both Henri-Edmond Cross and Paul Signac’s artistic development. The artist’s ambitious painting The Circus (1890–1891) remained unfinished when he died unexpectedly on March 29, 1891 at the age of 31. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, among others.