Georges Seurat’s "A Sunday on the Grande Jatte" (1884) was first shown at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886. It was not made to be shown there. Rather, it was conceived as a Salon machine to be shown to a broad Parisian public. Its critical fate in the various avant-garde venues where it in fact appeared can tell us much about the broader restructuring of the spaces of exhibition and the accompanying formal compression of pictorial space that followed in the art called Post-Impressionist.

Marnin Young is the author of "Realism in the Age of Impressionism; Painting and the Politics of Time."