Georges Seurat painted A Sunday Afternoon between May 1884 and March 1885, and from October 1885 to May 1886, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park[2] and concentrating on issues of colour, light, and form.

[3] Inspired by optical effects and perception inherent in the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and others, Seurat adapted this scientific research to his painting.

[4] Seurat contrasted miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors that when unified optically in the human eye were perceived as a single shade or hue.

He believed that this form of painting, called Divisionism at the time (a term he preferred)[5] but now known as Pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brushstrokes.

With La Grande Jatte, Seurat was immediately acknowledged as the leader of a new and rebellious form of Impressionism called Neo-Impressionism.

Whereas the bathers in that earlier painting are doused in light, almost every figure on La Grande Jatte appears to be cast in shadow, either under trees or an umbrella, or from another person.

For Parisians, Sunday was the day to escape the heat of the city and head for the shade of the trees and the cool breezes that came off the river.

Seurat also painted a man with a pipe, a woman under a parasol in a boat filled with rowers, and a couple admiring their infant child.

[9] In the 1950s, historian and Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch drew social and political significance from Seurat's La Grande Jatte.

Afterward, critique of the work often centered on the artist's presumed mathematical and robotic interpretation of the meaning of modernity in Paris.

According to historian of Modernism William R. Everdell: Seurat himself told a sympathetic critic, Gustave Kahn, that his model was the Panathenaic procession in the Parthenon frieze.

He was a bit of a democrat—a "Communard", as one of his friends remarked, referring to the left-wing revolutionaries of 1871; and he was fascinated by the way things distinct and different encountered each other: the city and the country, the farm and the factory, the bourgeois and the proletarian meeting at their edges in a sort of harmony of opposites.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was purchased on the advice of the Art Institute of Chicago's curatorial staff in 1924.

[21] The 1986 John Hughes film Ferris Bueller's Day Off featured the painting during a scene at the Art Institute of Chicago.