Georges Seurat [Movement: Neo-Impressionism]
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Summary:
Seurat, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. His most famous works include The Bathers & Grande Jatte.
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Optical Mixing:
The tiny dots of different coloured paint which used instead of long brush-strokes, when side by side, give the viewer's eye a chance to blend the colour optically, rather than having the colours blended on the canvas or pre-blended on a palette.
Seurat never used black.
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Full Biography:
Seurat came from a middle-class family and had inherited from his father. Although not rich, Seurat never had to worry about money as van Gogh, Seurat attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he learned to make realistic drawings of Greek statues and naked models. During his time at the Academy, Seurat became familiar with the colour theories of Eugene Chevreul. Chevreul had written a book in 1839, in which he laid down the principles of complimentary colours and the discovery, that all colours were based only on red, yellow and blue. He died very young at age 31. His dot manifesto lived only from about 1880 to 1900.