If you learned anything about art history in elementary school, you probably saw the painting Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 as an example of Pointillism. And that's probably all you learned about it until many years later. The artwork is comprised of around 220,000 dots of paint that seemed like a monumental task -and it was- that foreshadowed digital art a hundred years later. Seurat worked on the painting for more than two years before he unveiled it.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 was completed in 1886 when Seurat was only 26 years old. it became his most famous painting, but not the only one. He could have eclipsed his own masterpiece if he hadn't died at age 31. He didn't live long enough to see the painting become what it is now, as art critics of the time didn't think much of it. So he changed it over time. The story of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 becomes richer the more you know about it, so find out what this painting is all about in a fun facts list that tells that story at Mental Floss.