Founder of Pointillism, the man who painted with science
A Post-Impressionist painter, founder of Pointillism. He pushed the Impressionists’ intuition of light and color into a near-scientific method: not mixing color on the palette, but juxtaposing tiny dots of pure color densely on the canvas, letting the viewer’s eye, at a distance, "mix" the wanted color of itself. He died young, at only thirty-one, yet with enormous patience left behind such a masterpiece as A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
In A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the crowd at leisure by the Seine is all "arranged," dot by dot, from countless points of pure color. Seurat spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dots to finish it. He turned painting into a precise experiment in optics and color — from afar a serene afternoon, up close a dense, quivering swarm of colored molecules.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.