What Is Pointillism? Seurat, the Dots and Optical Mixing

Pointillism is a painting technique in which the image is built up from small dots of pure, unmixed colour that are meant to blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. It was developed by Georges Seurat in Paris in the 1880s and is also called divisionism or Neo-Impressionism. His A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte of 1884–1886 is its masterpiece.

Facts

Painting with dots

Anyone who goes close to a pointillist painting sees thousands of small dots in pure colours: blue, orange, green, violet. Step back a few metres and the dots merge into grass, water, shadows and skin. That is the basic idea: instead of mixing colours on the palette, where they become darker and muddier, the painter places them side by side and lets the eye do the mixing. This is called optical mixing.

The word pointillism comes from the French point, meaning dot. Seurat himself preferred other terms and spoke of a painting built on scientific principles of light and colour. The critic Félix Fénéon called the movement Neo-Impressionism in 1886, and divisionism is often used for the principle itself of dividing colour into its component parts, even when it is applied in strokes rather than dots.

Seurat and La Grande Jatte

Georges Seurat was a meticulous and theoretical painter. He studied books on colour theory, made masses of drawings and oil sketches, and worked for two years on his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It shows Parisians relaxing on an island in the Seine on a Sunday, with parasols, dogs and a monkey on a lead. The figures are stiff and almost geometric, as if from an ancient frieze.

The painting was shown at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and attracted great attention. It became a manifesto for a new direction: the light and colour of the Impressionists, but with order, method and calm in place of spontaneity. Seurat died as early as 1891, aged only 31. The painting is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The science behind it: contrast and mixing

The pointillists built on 19th-century research into colour. The chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, described the law of simultaneous contrast in 1839: the same colour looks different depending on what surrounds it, and complementary colours intensify each other when placed side by side. The American physicist Ogden Rood wrote in 1879 about how light from small patches of colour blends in the eye. Seurat read both.

The explanatory illustrations further down show the two principles. In the first you can drag the distance and watch two pure colours fuse; compare this with the same colours mixed on the palette. In the second you can see how the background changes a colour. Read more about colour in the colour section of Looking at Art and in the guide to complementary colours.

Did it work?

Both yes and no. The dots give a shimmering, vibrating surface, especially in light areas, and the paintings have a luminous quality that is hard to achieve with mixed colours. But optical mixing is not the same as mixing pigments. Yellow and blue side by side do not become green in the eye but a pale, greyish intermediate, and from a distance many pointillist paintings look more muted and pearly grey than the theory promised.

The method was also laborious. A large canvas could take months or years. For that reason several of his followers moved on to larger, square brushstrokes, in which the colour was still pure but the technique quicker.

Seurat's other works

Seurat managed to paint only a few large canvases in his short life, and each was a programme. Bathers at Asnières of 1884, in the National Gallery in London, shows young workers resting by the river opposite La Grande Jatte; it is not yet painted in dots but in short, crossed brushstrokes. In The Models of 1886–1888 he placed three nude models in the studio in front of his own Grande Jatte, as if to show that the method could also handle the classical subject.

In his last works, such as The Circus of 1891, the lines themselves carry the emotion: rising lines were to convey joy, falling lines sorrow. Seurat based this on contemporary theories of the expressive power of lines and colours. The Circus was not quite finished when he died, and it is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Followers and legacy

Paul Signac was Seurat's closest friend and became the movement's spokesman after his death. Camille Pissarro, the oldest of the Impressionists, painted with dots for a period but then returned to freer brushwork. Vincent van Gogh tried the technique in Paris in 1887 and carried the short strokes of pure colour into his own painting.

Around 1904 Henri Matisse painted in a pointillist style before moving on to the large, flat fields of colour that became Fauvism. The idea of building an image from points lives on in the halftone dots of printing and the pixels of the screen. Read about the context in the guide to Post-Impressionism and in the Post-Impressionism period, and compare it with the freer brushwork of Monet in Impression, Sunrise. The term also appears in the glossary.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Where do the colours blend in a pointillist painting?