Neo-Impressionism

Neo-Impressionism is an art movement of the 1880–1900 period. The gallery holds 31 works in this movement, including works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. Browse Neo-Impressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Neo-Impressionism emerged in Paris in the mid-1880s as a deliberate, scientifically minded revision of Impressionism. Its founding moment was the appearance of Georges Seurat's monumental "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition and the Salon des Indépendants in 1886. The critic Félix Fénéon coined the term "Neo-Impressionism" that same year. Where the Impressionists had chased fleeting atmosphere with spontaneous, improvised brushwork, Seurat and his circle sought to put painting on a rational footing, drawing on the colour theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and the American physicist Ogden Rood to build durable, harmonious compositions from optical principles.

The movement's defining technique was the application of small, separate touches of pure, unmixed pigment placed side by side so that they fuse in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette. This practice of optical mixture is known as Divisionism, while the closely related habit of applying paint in precise, regular dots is called Pointillism. Juxtaposing complementary colours—a dab of orange beside blue, for instance—the Neo-Impressionists aimed for a vibrancy and luminosity greater than premixed paint could yield. The method demanded patience and produced still, almost frozen scenes governed by carefully calibrated horizontals, verticals and proportions.

Seurat (1859–1891) was the movement's originator, and beyond "La Grande Jatte" he produced "Models," "Circus Sideshow" ("Parade de cirque"), "Le Chahut" and the unfinished "The Circus." His early death from illness at thirty-one left Paul Signac as the group's leading intellect and advocate. Signac codified its principles in the 1899 treatise "D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme" and applied them to luminous Mediterranean harbour scenes such as those at Marseilles, Collioure and Concarneau. The circle also included the elder Impressionist Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien, Henri-Edmond Cross, Charles Angrand, the Belgian painters Théo van Rysselberghe and Anna Boch, and others who carried the style across France and into Belgium via Les XX.

Though its strict phase was brief, Neo-Impressionism's reach was considerable. Signac and Cross, settled on the Côte d'Azur, mentored a younger generation; when Henri Matisse joined them at Saint-Tropez in 1904 he absorbed their divided colour and produced "Luxe, calme et volupté," a direct bridge to Fauvism. The movement thus stands as the methodical successor to Impressionism and a crucial conduit toward the liberated colour of early twentieth-century modernism, its scientific ambition echoing later in Robert Delaunay's Orphism.