A Sunday made of dots
A hot summer’s day on the Seine, on the island of La Grande Jatte at the edge of Paris. A gentleman in a top hat and a lady with a parasol walk stiffly in profile; she has a small monkey on a leash. In the shade a boatman lies smoking a pipe, a girl in white runs across the grass, sailing boats glide along the river. No one speaks to anyone else. Everyone stands still, as if made of stone.
Step closer and the picture dissolves into hundreds of thousands of tiny touches of colour. Georges Seurat worked for almost two years on the canvas, more than three metres wide, and made dozens of sketches and drawings for it. In May 1886 he showed it at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition. Critics mocked it, but a few young painters were thrilled. The painting now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Painting by the rules
The Impressionists had put their colours on the canvas quickly and by instinct. Seurat wanted more order. He read the colour theories of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul and the American physicist Ogden Rood, who described how colours intensify each other when placed side by side, orange next to blue, for example.
So Seurat stopped mixing his colours on the palette. He set pure dots of colour close together and left it to the eye to blend them at a distance, which was meant to make the pictures brighter and more luminous. The artists themselves spoke of Divisionism, the division of colour; the public soon called it Pointillism, from the French point, dot. The theory did not fully work out: close up the pictures often shimmer rather than glow, and some colours have changed. A zinc yellow in the Grande Jatte had already darkened to a dull brown a few years later.
A name and a group
In 1884 Seurat had met the young Paul Signac at the first exhibition of the Indépendants in Paris, which was open to all without a jury. Signac became his closest ally. For a short time Camille Pissarro, a generation older and one of the founders of Impressionism, painted in dots as well; around 1890 he gave the technique up because it was too slow for him. Later in 1886 the critic Félix Fénéon gave the new painting its name: Neo-Impressionism.
Seurat painted only a few more large pictures after that, among them nudes in his studio (Les Poseuses) and evening performances at the circus and the music hall. In March 1891 he died at the age of 31, probably of an infection. His last picture, Le Cirque, remained unfinished.
Brussels and the Mediterranean
As early as 1887 Seurat exhibited in Brussels with the artists’ group Les XX. Belgian painters such as Théo van Rysselberghe and Henry van de Velde took up the dot technique; van de Velde later turned entirely to architecture and design and became one of the fathers of Art Nouveau.
After Seurat’s death Signac led the movement. In 1892 he sailed his boat into Saint-Tropez, then a quiet fishing village, and stayed. His friend Henri-Edmond Cross lived not far away on the same coast. Under the southern sun their dots grew larger and their colours stronger, like the tesserae of a mosaic. In 1899 Signac set out the movement’s programme in his book D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme.
Matisse in Saint-Tropez
In the summer of 1904 Henri Matisse spent several weeks with Signac in Saint-Tropez and tried his hand at the dot technique. The result was Luxe, calme et volupté, named after a line by Charles Baudelaire: nude bathers on a beach in large, glowing patches of colour. Signac bought the picture. But Matisse soon found the method too confining. A year later he and his friends showed pictures in wild, flat colours in Paris, and the critics called them the Fauves, the wild beasts. With that, Neo-Impressionism as a movement was over.
Why it still matters
Neo-Impressionism was the first painting that tried to derive its rules from science. The idea that colour on a canvas has a force of its own, independent of the subject, passed from here to Matisse, Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay. Vincent van Gogh, too, painted in dots and dashes for a while in Paris. And anyone looking at a screen today sees an image assembled from tiny dots of colour. Seurat’s Grande Jatte eventually became a legend in its own right, all the way to Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George.
Further reading
- Paul Signac: D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (1899).
- Robert L. Herbert et al.: Georges Seurat 1859–1891, exhibition catalogue Paris and New York (1991).
- John Rewald: Post-Impressionism. From van Gogh to Gauguin (1956).