Pigment and Perception in Late Nineteenth-Century Painting

By the 1880s a number of European painters had grown dissatisfied with the way pigments behaved. Mixing two colours on the palette reliably produced a third that was duller than either, because each pigment absorbs part of the light the other reflects. Georges Seurat's response was to stop mixing altogether. He laid down small, separate touches of unmixed colour and left the combining to be done in the eye of the viewer, who at a sufficient distance can no longer resolve the individual marks. The technique was slow, deliberate and, to its admirers, scientific.

[A] Whether it worked as advertised is another matter. [B] Contemporary accounts often praised the luminosity of the results, and the paintings do hold their brilliance where a mixed passage would sink into grey. [C] Yet the optical theory Seurat drew on was not quite the one physicists were developing, and the distances at which his canvases actually blend are shorter than the theory implies. [D] Later commentators have suggested that the method's real achievement was compositional rather than optical: the uniform grain of the touches imposes a calm, tapestry-like order on the surface, and it is this, more than any gain in brightness, that gives the pictures their peculiar stillness.