Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Neo Impressionist artists used optical theory as the basis for their colorful paintings. Like the Impressionists before them, the Neo Impressionists were concerned with the effects of natural light. While the Impressionists painted their subjective experience of the vistas they depicted, the Neo Impressionists strove to create scientific renderings of scenes. These artists, including Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, placed dabs of pure color on the canvas, believing that colors appear more vibrant when blended in the viewer’s eye than when mixed by the artist. Seurat’s style consisted of precise dots of color that blended together at a distance, and it became known as Pointillism. Seurat’s most celebrated work, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) is painstakingly composed of dabs of contrasting and alike tones. Other artists who worked in this style were Camille Pissarro, Maximilien Luce, and Théo Van Rysselberghe.

Neo Impressionism played an important role in the development of avant-garde art in the twentieth century, directly influencing Henri Matisse and the artists known as the Fauves. Other artists who would later turn to pure abstraction in their work, like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, began their careers painting in a Neo Impressionist style. The movement’s scientific analysis of color encouraged such artists to move away from figurative painting into their mature abstract styles.