Get close enough to A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat’s great painting in the Art Institute of Chicago, and the strollers, parasols and river disappear. You see dots. Thousands of tiny touches of colour side by side, red next to green, orange next to blue, unmixed. Step back a few paces and, little by little, the dots vanish: the sunlit grass returns, the cool shade, the light of a summer afternoon by the Seine. What happened between those two moments isn’t on the canvas. It’s in your eyes. That’s the simple, radical idea of pointillism.
Painting with science
By the mid-1880s Impressionism had spent years transforming painting with its attention to light and the fleeting moment. But a young Parisian painter, Georges Seurat, felt it lacked method. He wanted light and colour to be built with the same precision as a building.
He was drawn to the scientific colour theories of his day, including the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s ideas on simultaneous contrast, which held that a colour changes appearance depending on its neighbours. And he asked: what if, instead of mixing colours on the palette, you set them down pure, side by side, and let the eye do the mixing at a distance?
La Grande Jatte
Seurat worked on La Grande Jatte for two years, from 1884 to 1886. He began with a layer of small horizontal strokes, then added the dots that read as solid forms from afar. He made numerous studies and sketches, adjusting every figure and every shadow. The result, a canvas more than two metres by three, was shown in 1886 and hailed as the birth of a new movement: Neo-Impressionism.
Some years later, in 1889, Seurat returned to the painting and added a border of coloured dots between the scene and the frame, so that even the transition from picture to surroundings was controlled.
Pointillism, Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism
The names can be confusing. Pointillism was in fact a term some critics coined in the late 1880s with a touch of mockery, to poke fun at the technique of Seurat and his colleague Paul Signac. Seurat himself preferred «chromo-luminarism». Divisionism refers to the broader principle of separating colours into distinct strokes, not necessarily dots. And Neo-Impressionism is the name of the movement that brought together Seurat, Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross and other painters who took up the method.
Seurat died very young, in 1891, at thirty-one. Signac carried the method on for decades, with broader strokes, almost like mosaic tiles, and ever more intense colour.
How optical mixing works
It’s worth being precise here, and not overstating things. Optical mixing isn’t the eye magically «creating» colours. Something simpler happens: when small patches of different colours sit very close together and are seen from a distance, the eye can’t separate them and perceives an average of them. Blue and yellow dots packed closely together read, from afar, as a green with a vibrating quality, different from a green mixed on the palette.
Seurat hoped this mixing in the eye would give brighter colour than mixing pigments. In practice, historians and colour scientists have qualified that: the result isn’t always brighter, but it does have a vibration, texture and light all its own, which is what makes these paintings unmistakable.
A kinship with printing
Here’s something of interest to anyone with prints at home. Modern printing also builds colour from dots. An inkjet printer lays down tiny droplets of a handful of colours, and at normal viewing distance our eyes blend them into a continuous image. The principle isn’t the same as Seurat’s, who worked with visible brushstrokes and was after painterly effects, but it shares the underlying idea: the final colour is completed in the act of looking. We explain this in how an art print is made.
Close up, far away
Pointillism teaches something valuable about art in general: distance is part of the work. The same painting is two different things up close and from afar, and both are true. At home the lesson applies to any print: look at it from the sofa, and also go close to see how it’s made.
Seurat’s work is in the public domain, and the Art Institute of Chicago offers images of La Grande Jatte on its website so you can explore it in detail.
Keep reading: The Psychology of Colour in Art and Interiors, Sonia Delaunay and the Art of Simultaneous Colour and The Colour Wheel as a Tool for Looking at Art.