Collection: Neo-Impressionism

Neo-Impressionism is the broader scholarly label for the movement around Georges Seurat and Paul Signac that developed Pointillism and Divisionism into a coherent late nineteenth-century programme. The term was coined by the critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to distinguish the new optical method from the looser Impressionist handling out of which it had emerged.

The movement ran from approximately 1886 to 1910, with strong branches in France and Belgium. Fénéon's circle, the Brussels group Les XX, and the Paris Salon des Indépendants provided the principal showing platforms outside the official Salon. The principal practitioners were Henri-Edmond Cross, Théo van Rysselberghe, Maximilien Luce, Charles Angrand, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Hippolyte Petitjean, Georges Lemmen, and the briefly affiliated Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien.

The movement attached a partly political programme to its colour theory, with Signac, van Rysselberghe, and several others identifying as anarchists or libertarian socialists. After Seurat's early death in 1891, Signac codified the theory in his 1899 book D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme.