Georges Seurat was a painter and founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism. Seurat attended theEcole des Beaux-Arts in 1878-1879. After a year of service at Brest military academy, he returned to Paris. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting, which was rejected by the Paris Salon. Seurat allied himself with artists from Paris and formed the Societe des Artistes Independants. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism and in the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.