Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris in 1859 and, in a tragically short life of just thirty-one years, created a body of work that fundamentally changed the direction of painting. Brilliantly gifted as a draughtsman — his charcoal drawings are among the most beautiful of the nineteenth century — Seurat became convinced that the intuitive colour methods of the Impressionists could be placed on a rigorous scientific foundation. Drawing on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood, and Charles Blanc, he developed a technique he called Chromoluminarism (later known as Pointillism or Divisionism) in which tiny dots of pure colour are placed side by side on the canvas, blending optically in the viewer’s eye.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), his masterpiece, took two years to complete and remains one of the most recognizable images in art. Nearly seven feet tall and over ten feet wide, it depicts Parisians relaxing in a park beside the Seine, frozen in attitudes of hieratic stillness, rendered entirely in meticulously applied dots of colour. The effect is at once dazzling and strangely dreamlike, as if Impressionism’s fleeting moment has been crystallized into eternal permanence.
Seurat’s premature death from diphtheria in 1891 cut short one of the most original careers in art history. His influence extended through Signac and the Neo-Impressionists to the Fauves, the Futurists, and beyond.