Pointillism can be described relatively simply – it’s an art movement named after a technique in which small dots of color are applied to canvas in order to form an image. Today, the term dotted art is also in colloquial use, and it describes the application of small dots of different color painted on canvas. As a historical art movement, Pointillism has a very particular implication, but nowadays it’s usually described as a special technique that has been used by a number of different artists, all of them creating in various contexts when it comes to art movements. The birth of Pointillism dates back to the Belle Epoque in Paris and the time of the Impressionists. It is generally related to the French painter George Seurat, whose masterpiece Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte is widely praised as the most famous of the Pointillism paintings. George Seurat and Paul Signac’s practice and paintings led to the emergence of Pointillism, usually associated with the year 1886. Both artists used this style earlier, but it was art critics who coined the term, in order to describe their extraordinary innovative approach to canvas and paint. In the very beginning (the late 19th Century), the critique had a rather mocking attitude towards the technique used by Seurat and Signac – they were criticizing their practice, believing that the term “Pointillism” would have a pejorative connotation. However, history proved these sharp-penned pedantists wrong, while Pointillism entered the books as one of the most progressive art movements of the era. Introducing a completely new perception in the field of color studies, Pointillism has had a huge influence on various art movements, spanning from the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th. Terms dotted art and pointillism refer to the same thing. The only difference is that Pointillism is used more among art historians, art lovers and collectors, while the dotted art among wider public. Dotted art is popular among non-professional artists and there are many other artistic practices that use “dotted painting”. For example, Aboriginal art is, among many other things, known for its dotted paintings. Apart from these contextualizing differences, there isn’t much more to be said about differences between dotted art and Pointillism.

 Pointillism is sometimes wrongly associated with Divisionism (sometimes called chromoluminarism). Divisionists also used a similar technique of patterns to form images, but the final result of their practice was different. Both techniques emerged at the same time, and both of them were considered to be part of Post-Impressionism.
Divisionism emerged thanks to the scientific theories and rules of color. For example, famous Charles Blanc’s color wheel influenced the practice of Divisionists. However, while divisionism was preoccupied with colors, and their divisions, Pointillism was founded on possibilities of creating patterns, shapes and perspectives out of dots. When pointilist piece of art was created, not much attention was given to the separation of colors. It could be argued that the confusions arose due to the fact that same artists were “responsible” for the emergence of Pointillism as well as Divisionism (Seurat, Signac, and even van Gogh). Maybe the biggest deference between the two styles may be noticed when inspecting the “final product”. Divisionists used larger cube-like brushstrokes, while Pointillism compositions are obviously characterized by multicolor dots. 

Camille Pissarro was one of the artists that stood out within the use of Pointillism as a painting technique. But how did he get to that point? By the 1880s, Pissarro had already begun to explore new themes and methods in order to break out of the ordinary painting at the time. So, he turned his back to Impressionism, and went all the way back to his early topics – portraying a common man, with his paintings depicting people at home, or at work, but in rather realistic settings. It was the time when Pissarro met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who already had used small patches of colors to create the illusion of blended colors and shading when viewed from a distance. Pissarro embraced the new technique referred to as Pointillism and spent years from 1885 to 1888 practicing and implementing it in his work. Pissarro eventually became the only artist who went from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. But later on, he turned away from Post-Impressionism, claiming that its system was too artificial. Albert Dubois was a French military officer who fought in the Franco-Prussian war. But, there was another part of is personality, which was in direct opposite to militarism. He wanted to be a painter, so he taught the techniques for himself, and eventually closely aligned with Post-Impressionist as an amateur painter. He was certainly talented, and various Salons accepted his work for exhibitions during 1877. Dubois was a friend of Georges Seurat, and he was the one who founded the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, and also helped to write its statute. In the meantime, Albert Dubois became one of the first artists to adopt Pointillism. But, his military service conflicted his artistic expressions, so he had to hide. In order to camouflage his artistic practice, he started signing his art pieces with his last name, Dubois, with the addition of his mother’s maiden name – Pillet. So, he remained known as Albert Dubois-Pillet in the artistic circles. Charles Angrand was a French artist who gained acknowledgment for his paintings and drawings, later deemed Post-Impressionistic. He was an important member of the Parisian avant-garde art scene in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Influenced by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, Charles Angrand also interacted with artists like Seurat and Signac through the mid-1880s, which led his style towards Post-Impressionism. Although, Angrand’s implementation of Pointillist techniques differed from others’. His palette was more muted than bright contrast colors of Seurat and Signac. Angrand mostly used dots of various colors to enhance shadows, but he was avoiding the violent coloration found in many other works of the manner. He painted in monochrome conté crayon technique, which could be seen in his self-portrait, for instance. “His drawings are masterpieces. It would be impossible to imagine a better use of white and black. These are the most beautiful drawings, poems of light, of fine composition and execution”, Paul Signac noted for Angrand’s artworks. Even Vincent van Gogh painted occasionally in a Pointillist style. Lucien Pissarro, son of Camille Pissarro, believed it was due to his father’s direct influence on Vincent van Gogh and his art. Reportedly, it was his brother and art dealer Theo van Gogh who first came to an idea to connect Vincent with Camille Pissaro. It happened in 1884 when Pissarro accepted to take in the celebrated painter as a lodger in his home. Lucien Pissarro wrote that his father was impressed by Van Gogh’s work and had foreseen the power of this artist, who was 23 years younger than himself. Camille’s son also noted that his father did explain different ways of finding and expressing light and color to their young protege, which he later used in his paintings. Largely influenced by Pointillism at the time, Pissarro also transferred some of that technique to van Gogh, who later occasionally painted some of his paintings using the dotted art. Fauvists were definitely one of the first movements that leaned on color, following the path of Pointillism in a slightly different mode. By 1905, Henri Matisse was considered to be the leader of the Fauve movement in France. What Matisse did was the combination of pointillist pure colors and Paul Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space to develop the wild expression – a way of not just seeing the world, but feeling it as well. One million dots in nine years of Damien Hirst’s artwork-in-production seems nothing in comparison to the Hero, made by illustrator and artist Miguel Endara, which is composed of approximately 3.2 million black ink dots, and took only 210 hours to be completed. This artwork is produced by using a single Sakura Pigma Micron pen with nib size of 005, or should we say the thinness of 0.20 mm. The number of dots in the whole art piece was determined by multiplying the average drawing speed of 4.25 dots per second.