Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) was born in Paris. After early lessons at a municipal drawing school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 under Henri Lehmann, where he had a conventional academic training drawing from antique casts and copying old-master drawings. After a year of military service at Brest he spent two years mastering monochrome drawing in conté crayon, and studied Delacroix's use of colour closely. He devised the techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism, in which small juxtaposed dots of colour are blended by the eye rather than on the palette, drawing on the colour theories of writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul. When the Salon rejected Bathers at Asnières in 1884, he showed it with the Indépendants and joined Paul Signac and others in founding the Société des Artistes Indépendants. He died in Paris in 1891, aged 31, leaving The Circus unfinished. Here: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which took him two years, was first shown at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and launched Neo-Impressionism.