Georges Seurat, whose pointillist (or divisionist) technique…

Georges Seurat, whose pointillist (or divisionist) technique is now in the ascendant in Paris, is the first painter to have expressly founded a style on the intrinsic reactions of color to color and a codified vocabulary of expressive forms.

The consistent granulation of color in Seurat's work from 1885 is specific to the picture, not to the sensation or the subject.

Now twenty-six, he finally finishes his enormous painting A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte: 1884 (Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection; The Art Institute of Chicago) and exhibits it at the eighth (and final) Impressionist group show held in Paris at 1 rue Laffitte from May 15 to June 15, 1886.

His chief artistic associates at this time, painters also concerned with the effects of light on color, are Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac.

Pissarro, who exhibits twenty paintings and other works at the show, had insisted that Seurat and Signac be included.

Seurat's picture demonstration of his new Pointillist technique arouses great interest.

The unexpectedness of his art and the novelty of his conception excite the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren; the critic Félix Fénéon, author of Les Impressionistes en 1886 (Paris, 1886) praises Seurat's method in an avant-garde review.

In his review of the exhibition, Fénéon coins the tern “Neo-Impressionism” to describe the work of Seurat, Signac, and Pissarro, pioneers of a daring new vision that deviates distinctly from that of the Impressionists.

Seurat, temporarily living in a garret studio, begins work on Les Poseuses (The models).

This painting is to be the last of his compositions on the grand scale of the Baignade and La Grande Jatte; he considers adding a Place Clichy to this number but abandons the idea.