Georges Seurat

The inventor of Pointillism — the systematic method of building an image from small, distinct dots of pure color that the eye is meant to blend optically at a distance. Seurat trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was dissatisfied with what he found there. He was a rigorous intellectual who read scientific literature on color perception alongside his drawing practice, absorbing the color-contrast theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul and the American optical scientist Ogden Rood. The result was a painting method of almost obsessive precision — he called it Chromoluminarism or Divisionism — that was as close to a scientific experiment as painting had ever been. The centerpiece of his short career is A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), a monumental scene of Parisian leisure on an island in the Seine built entirely from tiny dots of pure pigment. It took two years and dozens of preparatory panels and drawings. When it was exhibited at the final Impressionist show in 1886, it divided the room: Pissarro championed it enthusiastically; Monet was unmoved. Paul Signac became Seurat's most devoted disciple and extended the method into a theoretical system after his death. Seurat died suddenly at thirty-one, apparently of a throat infection or meningitis, leaving fewer than a dozen major paintings and a body of oil-panel studies of extraordinary freshness. His method directly influenced Signac, the Dutch Neo-Impressionists, the Fauves (who took the free use of pure color and abandoned the dot), and the tradition of systematic optical painting that runs through 20th-century abstraction to Op Art.