Pointillism is painting with small dots of pure colour that blend in the eye.
Pointillism (also called Divisionism or Chromoluminarism) is a technique in which small, distinct dots of pure colour are applied to the canvas and blend optically in the viewer's eye rather than being physically mixed on the palette. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the approach in the 1880s, drawing on scientific colour theory — particularly Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879) — which argued that optical mixing produces more luminous results than pigment mixing. Seurat spent two years on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), covering its entire surface with millions of tiny, carefully considered dots. The technique requires extraordinary patience and produces results that vibrate with an unusual, almost electrical light. It directly influenced Fauvism and, through Signac's influence on Matisse, the entire 20th-century tradition of colour as feeling. Georges Seurat developed the technique from contemporary color theory — specifically the research of chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul on simultaneous contrast, and physicist Ogden Rood's writing on how the eye optically mixes adjacent colors more vividly than colors physically blended on a palette. His 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' (1884–1886), built from an estimated several million individual dots, took two years and remains the technique's defining masterpiece — a scene of Parisian leisure rendered with near-scientific rigor. Seurat called his method 'Divisionism' or 'Chromoluminarism,' seeing it as a more rigorous, almost systematic evolution of Impressionism's loose brushwork rather than a rejection of it; critics coined 'Pointillism' somewhat dismissively, emphasizing the dots over the theory. Paul Signac carried the technique forward after Seurat's early death at 31, and it fed directly into Fauvism, whose painters — including Matisse — passed through a Divisionist phase before pushing color further into pure, unmixed expression. Pointillism's underlying insight, that the eye can be made to do the work of blending, anticipates the logic of the modern pixel and of four-color offset printing, where tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black likewise merge into continuous color at normal viewing distance.