Pointilism stemmed from the Impressionist art movement, and was an artistic style involving the combination of lots of small dots of colour to provide paintings with a sense of vitality and light when viewed from a distance. The viewer’s eyes merge the equal sized dots to give a wave-like effect so that colours never appear as a concentrated whole as they do in conventional painting. This gives the work a shimmering appearance, particularly effective in illustrating the effects of sunlight and lending an element of vibrancy to the piece.

La Grand Jatte by Seurat in 1886 was one of the first paintings to which the term was applied, and the theory behind it became known as Divisionism. Other Neo-Impressionists who used this technique were Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac.

Although brief, the Neo-Impressionist movement was highly influential. The term Divisionism was applied to an Italian version of Neo-Impressionism in the 1890s and early 1900s, and it can also be seen in the 1909 Futurist art movement.

Our Art on Demand gallery contains the following pointillism art prints, posters and canvases: