Georges Seurat was a French painter and the founding figure of Neo-Impressionism, a
movement which dedicated itself to the scientific representation of light and color.
Seurat left the Impressionist movement and developed his "Divisionist" technique in an
attempt to bring formal structure to Impressionism. His goal was to demonstrate "optical
mixture." He accomplished this by placing small dots of contrasting colors next to one another
in his paintings. The effect is one of pure color that blends in the viewer's eye, not on the
palette or canvas. This technique is seen in the painting, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of
La Grande Jatte." This painting was shown in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Seurat
made countless drawings and oil sketches of different aspects of his initial ideas that were
ultimately included in his final canvases. He was careful to balance his compositions so that
no single aspect of the painting dominated the whole. Seurat's paintings proved to be a great
influence on the Post-Impressionists, including Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec.
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