Georges Pierre Seurat

Seurat worked out a system and then died at thirty one before he could do much with it. Pointillism, or divisionism as he preferred, applies small dots of unmixed colour that the eye combines at a distance, based on contemporary colour theory he had read carefully.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte took two years and is about ten feet wide. The figures stand frozen in profile, stiff as an Egyptian frieze, which was the point. He wanted the permanence of classical art applied to people in modern leisure clothes.

He made dozens of preparatory oil sketches and conte crayon drawings, and the drawings, built from smudged darkness with no line at all, are as good as anything he painted. Signac carried the method forward. Pissarro tried it and abandoned it.