Neo-Impressionism is a painting movement developed by George-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac in the late 1880s. Seurat's painting: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement; this painting is currently at "The Art Institute of Chicago". Neo-Impressionists painters applied scientific optical principles of light and colour to create strictly formalized compositions. [1] This technique, aimed to use optical mixture of colours, was based on the colour theories of Eugene Chevreul whose De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839. [2]
At the genesis of the movement:
"Signac, definitively won over... had just modified The Milliners following my technique at the same time as I was finishing the Jatte ." Signac added dabs of pure color over the originally broadly painted surface to produce the desired divided effect. Its genesis in two stages is probably responsible for the painting's present fragility, which prevents it from traveling.
Signac painted his first divisionist canvases at Asniéres in the spring of that year: The Junction at Bois Colombes, The Gas Tanks at Clichy, and Passage du Puits Bertin, Clichy. Neo Impressionism was born. Signac recognized his friend's genius from the start and "benefited from [his] researches," as Seurat himself pointed out. This "exact technique" permitted him to give color a predominant role, and he remained faithful to it to the end. [3]
Other important painters of this movement were: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce and Albert Dubois Pillet. The group founded a Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884. This movement influenced the works of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse.