Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow, 1888, oil on canvas, 39¼” x 59”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Public Domain
Pointillism (noun)
Click here for pronunciation.
Also called Divisionism and Chromoluminarism, this is a style of painting in which very small dots of contrasting color are placed next to one another on a canvas. When a viewer stands back from the painting, these colors blend in the eye to become the artist’s desired color.
Georges Seurat, who was engaged with the scientific color theory of Ogden Rood, a nineteenth-century American physicist, invented Pointillism.
