Neo-Impressionism

In 1884 Georges Seurat began a composition of a Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte island in the Seine — nearly two metres high and three metres wide — and painted it entirely in tiny dots of unmixed colour. When it appeared at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 alongside the work of Paul Signac, it announced Neo-Impressionism: the attempt to put Impressionism's intuitions about colour on a scientific footing. Seurat had been reading the colour theorist Ogden Rood and the chemist Eugène Chevreul on simultaneous contrast, and he believed that small dots of pure colour placed side by side would blend optically in the viewer's eye — producing more luminous results than physically mixed pigment. The technique, known as Pointillism (or, in its more freehand form, Divisionism), spread to Signac, Pissarro (briefly), the Belgian group Les XX, and later influenced the Fauves. It was always more an intellectual programme than a popular taste, but its influence on subsequent colour theory was profound.

How to recognise it

The dot — small, consistent, carefully placed — is the unmistakable signature. Stand close and you see a mosaic of pure colour; step back and the dots merge into coherent form. Colour is systematically divided: shadows contain their complementary colours, highlights shimmer with reflected hues. The overall effect is of unusual luminosity — surfaces seem to glow rather than reflect. Compositions often have a curiously static, frozen quality; the methodical application of dots makes spontaneity technically impossible. Subjects are frequently leisure landscapes — beaches, parks, riverbanks — or social scenes. Seurat's work tends toward monumental stillness despite the pointillist surface; Signac's is more energetic. If the paint surface resembles mosaic or embroidery made of colour-theory, it is almost certainly Neo-Impressionist.