Pointillism is a way of painting with thousands of small dots of color, set side by side on the canvas instead of being mixed on the palette. From a few steps back, the dots merge, and the eye sees grass, skin, water or shadow.
Georges Seurat, a young French painter, developed the method in Paris in the mid-1880s.
His best-known example is A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a canvas he worked on between 1884 and 1886, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. It shows Parisians spending a summer Sunday on a riverside lawn, with parasols open against the sun.
Among them, a woman in a long dress walks a monkey on a leash. From across the room, the scene holds together. Up close, the monkey, the lawn and the dresses all break apart into specks of paint.
The name "pointillism" was taken from the French point, "dot," and the painters who used the method never liked it. Seurat preferred a name of his own that sounded scientific, chromoluminarism, built from the Greek for color and the Latin for light.
His friend and fellow painter Paul Signac refused the word for a reason of his own, which had nothing to do with science.
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Seurat staked La Grande Jatte on one promise: colors kept apart stay brighter than colors mixed together. Yet the painting in Chicago is not quite the one he finished. Soon after the last dot went down, one of his yellows began to darken, and the visitors of 1886 saw brighter colors than anyone sees there today.
Why paint in dots?
Seurat started from a problem every painter knows…
What You'll Discover
What lies underneath the dots.
Why Signac refused the word pointillism.
How pointillism differs from divisionism.
How scientists went looking for the lost yellow.
Which painter tried the method and gave it up.