The Eiffel Tower

When the Eiffel Tower was going up for the 1889 World's Fair, a good part of Paris hated it. Writers and artists signed a public protest calling the iron thing a monstrous eyesore looming over their city. Seurat, one of the most experimental painters in town, felt the opposite. He painted this small panel, only about six by nine inches, while the tower was still unfinished, its very top missing the crown it would soon get, so the structure seems to melt upward into a hazy sky. He built the whole thing from tiny separate dots of colour, his own invented method, letting the eye blend orange and blue into shimmering iron. He was among the earliest painters to take the tower seriously as a subject. He would be dead within two years, at 31.