Collection: Pointillism

Pointillism is a painting technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the mid-1880s, applying small dots or short strokes of pure colour in adjacent fields so that the eye blends them optically at viewing distance. The term was coined by art critics in the late 1880s, initially as ridicule. Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, established the method and made the broader scholarly label Neo-Impressionism for the same group.

After Seurat's early death in 1891, Signac became the movement's principal theorist, publishing D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme in 1899. The principal practitioners were Henri-Edmond Cross, Théo van Rysselberghe, Maximilien Luce, Charles Angrand, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Hippolyte Petitjean, Georges Lemmen, and Anna Boch. Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien adopted the method briefly in the late 1880s before returning to a freer Impressionist handling.

The movement influenced Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse in his early Fauvist period, and the early Cubism of Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay.