Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was a French painter born December 2, 1859, in Paris, where he also died, on March 29, 1891, at only 31. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1878, he studied contemporary theories of color and optics and used them to develop Pointillism, a technique built from tiny, discrete dots of pure, contrasting color that the eye blends at a distance. Seurat and the artists who adopted his method, including Paul Signac, became known as Neo-Impressionists, a rigorous offshoot of Post-Impressionism. His masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 to 1886, a monumental canvas of Parisians at leisure built entirely from his dot technique, remains one of the most recognizable paintings of the era.