Georges Seurat | The Birth of Pointilism

Georges Seurat was a French post-impressionist painter who developed the style of Pointillism.

Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris in 1859. There he received a classical training at two art schools. In 1879, he attended the fourth Impressionist exhibition, set up in opposition to The Salon, the home of the art establishment in France. At this exhibition, the young Seurat would have seen first-hand the works of artists such as Monet and Pissarro. This would have been a world away from his classical art training. Seurat would exhibit at the eighth, and final, Impressionist exhibition in 1886, but this just served in some ways to highlight the differences between his work by then and that of many of the Impressionists who had come before him. Indeed it was so different that it was hung in a separate room at the exhibition! It was at this exhibition that the critic Félix Fénéon would coin the term Neo-Impressionist to describe Seurat’s work.

Seurat’s early work is Impressionist in nature and focuses on outdoor scenes of peasant life, subjects typical of the Impressionists or the earlier Barbizon school. His first landmark work was the Bathers at Asnières, now in the National Gallery in London (see more on this work at    • Unexpected Views: Tom Lovelace on Seu...   at @The National Gallery ). It is a canvas on a monumental scale, measuring 2 metres x 3 metres. It has a far more realist style than his earlier Impressionistic works. His second landmark work, considered the beginning of the new style of Pointillism is a similarly huge canvas, A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of Grande Jatte. Seurat’s paintings, particularly his larger works, were meticulously planned with numerous preliminary sketches, in contrast to many of the Impressionists who endeavoured to finish a piece outdoors in one sitting.

Seurat’s new style of Pointillism was influenced by a number of nineteenth century texts on colour theory. He was interested in both how the arrangement of different colours can affect the perception of each colour, and the feelings that different colours produced in the viewer. With chromoluminarism, as he called it, or divisionism as it has become better known, Seurat applied paint with a scientific method to try to follow these theories. Pointilism was merely a specific form of divisionism, referring to the application of paint in very small dots or patches.

Seurat died suddenly of an infection in 1891 at the age of only 31. His legacy to the art world of the Pointillist technique was carried forward initially by Paul Signac and for a time by Camille Pissarro.

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See much more on Seurat and Pointilism here, with Waldemar Januszczak @Perspective
   • Ending The Impressionist Era on A Stu...  

Discover more about the neo-impressionism of Seurat and Signac here
   • What is Neo Impressionism? [Understan...  

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