Ladies wearing bustles and carrying parasols gaze out towards the water.
Dogs scamper around the feet of their mistresses, or snuffle in the grass in front of them. Shadows lengthen as the afternoon sun moves on. As we walk closer to the painting, however, we discover that the crisp features we saw from far away have become increasingly blurry. In fact, the closer we approach the painting, the more clearly we see that Seurat did not outline his figures with brush strokes at all, but rather composed his entire painting out of thousands upon thousands of dots. Individually, each dot is just a dab of paint on the canvas, but added together, the dots create the shapes of the painting's figures, the brilliance of its colors, and the feeling of a Sunday afternoon along the shore.