Georges Seurat was a French painter of the Post-Impressionist period. He was the son of a prosperous family, and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878.
The Impressionists tried to capture natural landscapes as they are seen by the human eye for a fleeting moment. They also studied new techniques for portraying light and using color. Seurat was working during this period and was interested in these techniques.
Seurat was the inventor of the painting technique which became known as Pointillism, which is the use of tiny dots of color which are blended by the viewer’s eyes into an image when the painting is viewed from a distance. He studied the science of perception and other scientific theories about how the eye worked, and tried to paint natural scenes according to these scientific principles. These principles had been newly discovered at that time.
His most famous painting using this technique is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) (above), which depicted Paris city dwellers relaxing on an island in the Seine River on the weekend.
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