Initially he applied coarser dots on areas of more even colour, used simultaneous colour contrast, then his blobs grew to become patches of paint resembling the tesserae of mosaics.
Divisionism
Seurat intended to use optical mixing of many tiny dots of colour, often contrasting, in Divisionism. How this worked out in his major paintings.
In 1880, a detailed realist, he then became more experimental with looser brushstrokes before adopting Divisionism in 1887. His later paintings took over from where van Gogh left off.
After a promisingly Realist start at the age of just 17, he progressed through Impressionist style and became a Divisionist in 1887-88.
In the last decade of his career, he visited Venice twice and painted it extensively. He also turned more to watercolours.
A pupil of Carol’s-Duran, he switched to Divisionism/Pointillism in 1891, when Georges Seurat died. Early paintings are gentle and delicate before he turned the chroma up.
For this final decade, he was prolific, painting a series of ports of France in 1929-31, and many other views of the coast of France and of Corsica.
Ports of France, and a town with its rivers, together with a floral still life inspired by the late watercolours of Paul Cézanne.
He originally used watercolours for preparatory sketches, but exhibited them in their own right later. They reveal a quite different art from his oil paintings.
Examining the detail of how he applied patches of paint over a period of almost fifty years reveals how his pointillism changed.
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