Image credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum

Study for 'A Sunday on the Island of La Grand Jatte': Couple Walking

Georges Seurat (1859–1891)

The Fitzwilliam Museum

Pointillism, the technique of painting in small discrete dots of pure colour, was developed by the French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat in the 1880s. He was interested in scientific theories of colour: how colours were blended in the eye and could be enhanced by contrasts of colour and tone. Seurat preferred to call it Divisionism and it is also known as Neo-Impressionism.