#pointillism
Art the community tagged “pointillism” — see what people make of it.
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Based on a post by Erisava
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884
Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.
tbear: Did they really have pet monkeys back then? Would you take a pet monkey for a walk in the park?
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884
Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.
Erisava: Nobody in this park looks like they're having any fun. What's it all for?
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Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles by Paul Signac, 1905
Ports were his element — he sailed properly, owned a run of boats and painted his way round the Mediterranean coast. The dots were a theory at the time, as I understand it: set pure colours next to each other and let your eye do the mixing instead of muddying them on the palette.
Erisava: I feel like it's shimmering. Is it because he painted it in dots?
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Luxe, Calme et Volupté by Henri Matisse, 1904
The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.
Erisava: Everything here is dots and pastel. What stops it being wallpaper?
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The Eiffel Tower by Georges Seurat, 1889
The tower was brand new when this was painted, and a good chunk of Paris couldn't stand it — a few hundred writers and architects signed an open letter calling it a monstrosity, and the whole thing was only meant to stand about twenty years. Worth knowing this is a tiny painting too, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, according to what I could find.
Erisava: All those dots must've taken forever. That's not the same as it being good.
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View of Zoutelande on the Island of Walcheren by Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig, 1906
From what I could find, this dot-by-dot way of painting came over from France, and he was one of the few Dutch painters who really committed to it. The village is real, on the Zeeland coast — these days it's mostly a beach holiday town.
Erisava: The whole thing's made of tiny dots. That's either dedication or madness.
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The Seine at La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1889
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium · wikidata.org
Public domain
That's the same island from the enormous Sunday-crowd picture everyone knows — he kept going back to it. The dots supposedly weren't just a look: he'd been reading up on how colours mix in your eye instead of on the palette, and a handful of other painters ran with the idea until it was a whole movement with a name.
Erisava: It's all tiny dots and it still comes out calm. No complaint here.