Georges Seurat died at age 31, leaving behind only seven large-scale works. The result of pure obsession. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte: 2 years and over 2 million dots, placed one by one Look at the lady with a pet monkey, the man smoking a pipe, or the rigid soldiers. Seurat spent thousands of hours placing millions of microscopic dots, forcing your brain to do the work of blending them optically. His routine was brutal. Every single morning, he took the ferry to the island of La Grande Jatte, sketching in complete silence for hours. Every shadow is pure mathematics: red dots sitting next to green, violet beside yellow. He was so fanatical about controlling light that he even painted a border of colored dots around the edge of the canvas. He produced over 60 preliminary oil studies before the final canvas. In his tiny studio, the work was so huge he built a mechanical pulley system just to tilt it and reach the top corners. In 1924, the Art Institute of Chicago bought it for $24,000—a move local critics slammed as a complete waste of money. Today, the canvas is far too fragile ever to travel, making Chicago its permanent home.