Impressionism: Art and Modernity | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the ...
Neo-Impressionism
The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as <anchor>Neo-Impressionism</anchor>. The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.
Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism \| Essay \| The Metropolitan Museum of Art \| Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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#### [Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History](/toah) [Essays](/toah/essays)

# Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism

[![Embroidery; The Artist's Mother](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/334652/757515/main-image)](/art/collection/search/334652)

#### [Embroidery; The Artist's Mother](/art/collection/search/334652)

Georges Seurat


[![Aman-Jean (Portrait of Edmond François Aman-Jean)](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/339751/740661/main-image)](/art/collection/search/339751)

#### [Aman-Jean (Portrait of Edmond François Aman-Jean)](/art/collection/search/339751)

Georges Seurat


[![Study for ](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/437658/802352/main-image)](/art/collection/search/437658)

#### [Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"](/art/collection/search/437658)

Georges Seurat


[![Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/437654/1652949/main-image)](/art/collection/search/437654)

#### [Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)](/art/collection/search/437654)

Georges Seurat


[![Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso)](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/459119/2183022/restricted)](/art/collection/search/459119)

#### [Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso)](/art/collection/search/459119)

Paul Signac


[![Self-Portrait](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/459727/1731809/restricted)](/art/collection/search/459727)

#### [Self-Portrait](/art/collection/search/459727)

Charles Angrand


[![The Artist's Garden at Saint-Clair](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/334087/755023/main-image)](/art/collection/search/334087)

#### [The Artist's Garden at Saint-Clair](/art/collection/search/334087)

Henri-Edmond Cross (Henri-Edmond Delacroix)


[![Le Pont Neuf](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/459736/913723/restricted)](/art/collection/search/459736)

#### [Le Pont Neuf](/art/collection/search/459736)

Hippolyte Petitjean


[![Le Pouliguen: Fishing Boats](https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/459269/2247931/restricted)](/art/collection/search/459269)

#### [Le Pouliguen: Fishing Boats](/art/collection/search/459269)

Paul Signac


**Dita Amory**

Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Neo-Impressionism is a term applied to an avant-garde art movement that flourished principally in France from 1886 to 1906. Led by the example of Georges Seurat, artists of the Neo-Impressionist circle renounced the random spontaneity of [Impressionism](/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm) in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Encouraged by contemporary writing on color theory—the treatises of Charles Henry, Eugène Chevreul, and Odgen Rood for example—Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of interwoven pigment result in a greater vibrancy of color in the observer’s eye than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette. Known as _mélange optique_ (optical mixture), this meticulous paint application would, they felt, realize a pulsating shimmer of light on the canvas. In the words of the artist Paul Signac, Neo-Impressionism’s greatest propagandist, “the separated elements will be reconstituted into brilliantly colored lights.” The separation of color through individual strokes of pigment came to be known as Divisionism, while the application of precise dots of paint came to be called Pointillism.

The art critic Félix Fénéon first used the term Neo-Impressionism to describe the paintings of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, and his son Lucien Pissarro, at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886. Seurat debuted his masterpiece _A Sunday on La Grande Jatte_( [Art Institute of Chicago, 1926.224](http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/27992)), a virtual manifesto for the Neo-Impressionist technique. His manner of weaving and layering small brushstrokes indeed achieved a tapestry-like paint surface of complementary and contrasting hues. Even [Vincent van Gogh](/toah/hd/gogh/hd_gogh.htm) admired Seurat’s expansive palette ( [61.101.17](/toah/works-of-art/61.101.17)), noting on a visit to Seurat’s studio the “fresh revelation of color.”

Neo-Impressionism cast its allure far and wide, traversing generations and national boundaries. Camille Pissarro ( [_View from My Window_, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, WA1950.185](http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/makedetail.php?pmu=730&mu=732&gty=qsea&sec=&dtn=15&sfn=Artist%20Sort,Title&cpa=1&rpos=0&key=WA1950.185)) was among the first to embrace Seurat’s system of color harmony, recognizing it as “a new phase in the logical march of Impressionism.” In Belgium, where French Neo-Impressionism debuted at the exhibition of Les XX in 1887, Theo van Rysselberghe adopted Seurat’s idiosyncratic technique, as did other avant-garde artists. Some years later, even [Henri Matisse](/toah/hd/mati/hd_mati.htm) tipped his hat to Neo-Impressionism when he joined Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross in Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1904, and painted _[Luxe, calme et volupté](http://dev-met-timeline.pantheon.io/nonmet/seni_2/)_, an imaginary figural landscape painted in divided brush marks of glowing color.

Georges Seurat’s powerful presence as the leader of Neo-Impressionism resonated among artists for decades. Charles Angrand’s self-portrait ( [1975.1.566](/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.566)) bears a striking resemblance to Seurat’s shadowy sheets drawn in black crayon ( [55.21.1](/toah/works-of-art/55.21.1); [61.101.16](/toah/works-of-art/61.101.16)). Henri-Edmond Cross and Hippolyte Petitjean adapted the Divisionist technique to watercolor painting. In Saint-Clair, a village on the Côte d’Azur near Saint-Tropez, Cross painted [radiant landscapes](/toah/hd/lafr/hd_lafr.htm) in watercolor, using a vivid palette of saturated color in mosaic-like brush marks ( [48.10.7](/toah/works-of-art/48.10.7)). Petitjean’s watercolors mastered the art of Pointillism to decorative perfection ( [1975.1.681](/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.681)). In the early twentieth century, [Fauve artists](/toah/hd/fauv/hd_fauv.htm) turned to Seurat’s technique for purity of color. Even abstract painters [Mondrian](/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm) and Kandinsky practiced Pointillism.

Were it not for Paul Signac, Neo-Impressionism might have lost all momentum following the early death of Seurat in 1891. Signac inherited the Divisionist banner and lobbied tirelessly on its behalf. It was Signac who introduced Seurat’s system of color harmony to the vanguard critics and writers who would champion it, and it was he who published the influential treatise _D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme_ (1899), an argument for Neo-Impressionism as the logical and legitimate successor to Impressionism. In Signac’s own work, the rigor and restraint of his early paintings ( [1975.1.209](/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.209)) gave way to a bold and luxuriant palette in later years ( [_Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice_, Toledo Museum of Art, 1952.78](http://emuseum.toledomuseum.org:8080/emuseum/objects/54774/entrance-to-the-grand-canal-venice?ctx=1f537e6a-ce5e-40ae-91c4-4e138baccaef&idx=0)). His marine watercolors ( [1975.1.718](/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.718)), in particular, enabled him to explore the purity and clarity of color, with no more than a pencil and a box of [watercolors](/toah/hd/bwtr/hd_bwtr.htm) in his itinerant pocket.

If Neo-Impressionism ultimately marked only a brief passage from the plein-air painting of Impressionism in the nineteenth century to radiant Fauvism and the geometry of [Cubism](/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm) in the twentieth, it codified a language essential to modernism and brought with it a new text of independent form and color.

* * *

#### Citation

Amory, Dita. “Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism.” In _Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History_. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd\_seni.htm (October 2004)

#### Further Reading

Ferretti-Bocquillon, Marina, et al. _Signac, 1863–1935_. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. [See on MetPublications](http://www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications/Signac_1863_1935)

Herbert, Robert, et al. _Georges Seurat, 1859–1891_. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991. [See on MetPublications](http://www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications/Georges_Seurat_1859_1891)

Sutter, Jean, ed. _The Neo Impressionists_. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970.

#### Additional Essays by Dita Amory

- Amory, Dita. “ [Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947): The Late Interiors](/toah/hd/bonn/hd_bonn.htm).” (November 2010)

- Amory, Dita. “ [The Barbizon School: French Painters of Nature](/toah/hd/bfpn/hd_bfpn.htm).” (March 2007)


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