This painting is the final preparatory sketch for Georges Seurat's Neo-Impressionist masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte. The final picture, which measures some six by ten feet, was first exhibited at the eighth Impressionist exhibition of 1886; it is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Grande Jatte was an island in the middle of the river Seine, located just to the northwest of central Paris. By the 1880s, it had become a popular place for fashionable urbanites to spend their Sunday afternoons. In the final canvas, Seurat applied his paint in a series of tiny, repetitive, dot-like strokes, a technique that critics quickly dubbed "pointillist." In this preparatory sketch, Seurat had not yet reduced his stroke to a uniform "point" or dot. He applied his paint more freely, in a series of mostly diagonal, crisscross, hatching strokes that one scholar likened to “chopped straw.”The sparkling surface enlivens and animates the scene; light appears as if it glances off the otherwise immobile figures placed rhythmically across the composition.

Seurat juxtaposed strokes of pure, unmixed color that allow fusion to take place in the eye of the spectator. There is no single expanse of unbroken color in this sketch. Instead, we see a host of clearly distinct hues—some closely related, as in the greens and yellows in the sun-drenched area of lawn in the middle ground—and some vividly contrasting, as in the reds and blues that form the costumes of many of the figures.