For Alexander.  This painting 'backward' the cycle or the procedures.  Think that it's easy to paint but not easy to paint in the mood like a photograph (and not the realist).  While it's contemporary in this our era, it has some mood back to the great moment of the past.  The composition is challenging as many masters try to do, with the sticks like a frames and one in the vertical even stand at the (nearly) middle of the vision : divide it to two parts and many blocks like a rigid pattern, but it's hardly noticeable that it still be shown very lively, moreover, the ones who noticed can realize its imaginable of old Egyptian engraved picturesque language - the cuneiform.  The human figures (and the overall technique of painting) invite us to dream of the past, in one way it resembles the cave figures.  The painting is full of ambiguity and contradiction, if you try to think of the past : Is it awful or wonderful ? when you have some mood of photo, and what about the figures (beach toys) ?.  When we look at this painting, should we feel joy or sorrow ?  Greatness or what else ?  Thinking of Alexander with beach toys.  Also, more comfortably ?, even in that past there were other things and others real life on that beach.  (Some said Alexander died on the desert sand, I regret for him, would it be better if he had played on the sand beach.)  Now, if you think of the painting in present time, you're still interrupted by the past feeling, think of Alexander and monuments still be left in the sea.  I confess that I am personally enjoy this colourful life picture, and the overall technique also overlaps some of Seurat's, in this case more abstract and not in the grass field park.