John Westbrooke gets up close and personal with a National Gallery exhibition of Pointillism
Back in the 1860s, some French artists began to investigate not just a new way of seeing but a new way of painting what they saw. The result has been pretty much a state of perpetual revolution in painting, which is still going on.
One of the earliest spinoffs from this Impressionist revolution was Pointillism, or Neo-Impressionism, the subject of an intriguing National Gallery exhibition, Radical Harmony, drawn from the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Dutch countryside.
Helene Müller was every artist’s dream: a woman of wealth and taste, who married entrepreneur Anton Kröller and began collecting contemporary art – the museum has the biggest collection of Van Goghs, an artist almost nobody appreciated, outside Amsterdam.
Pointillists were Impressionists plus science. Georges Seurat, the first and best known, researched optical theory and the use of colour, concluding that tiny dots of pure colour side by side, of the same or complementary colours, would fuse in the viewer’s eye to give the view extra luminosity.
The science is good; its principle lies behind much colour printing today, though those dots are microscopic rather than hand-dappled. But I got up close to Seurat’s “Port-en-Bessin, a Sunday” and you can indeed see each invidiviual dot, much as if you zoom right in on a photo on Photoshop.
I also tried backing away to see how far I’d have to go for the dots to merge into a unified image, and the answer was: quite a bit, 15 feet or so. No problem if you’ve got it hanging on the wall of your large living room; maybe less convenient in a crowded gallery.
And yes, it does appear luminous. Pointillists, like the Impressionists before them, took their easels on holiday to the coast; this was one of six paintings Seurat produced here in summer 1888. Here we see a small walled harbour, light blue skies and light cloud, pale yellow walls of low harbourside buildings, yachts drawn up with flags flapping.
Another adherent of the movement, Jan Toorop, produced an even more pared-back vision, just called “Sea”: modest-sized yellow-green waves roll in continuously and in parallel, and there’s little else but a few small boats rolling faintly in the seaspray. Step up close to see how the water is blue but with green and yellow dots to depict the sun’s effects, and white for the tops of the waves as they break.
Summer haze seems to be a natural subject for Pointillism, as the paintings don’t always get their dots in a row enough to form sharp outlines. Théo van Rysselberghe’s In “July, before Noon”” shows five women on an orchard lawn, sheltering under a tree with glimpses of sunlight dappling their clothes (again, white paint) through the leaves; two have their backs to the artist, two have their faces hidden under sunhats, one is mostly hidden behind a tree. It’s a restful depiction of well-off people busy doing nothing much.
Van Rysselberghe also painted portraits, but you can see in his “Woman Reading” that he’s relying less on dots to paint a human likeness; longer brushstrokes give a clearer, less fuzzy appearance to faces, and he eventually gave up the dots altogether. He had a point, so to speak. In Toorop’s “Evening (Before the Strike)”, a man is shown in twilight with a shadowy face; his female companion however appears to have a skin disease.
Seurat’s two most famous pictures aren’t in Otterlo, so not in the exhibition. One, “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte”, another sunny day with people standing or sitting by the riverside, is in Chicago. The other, “Bathers at Asnières” – a similar subject but with fewer, bigger people and much less smartly dressed – is right here at the National Gallery, just upstairs, and free to view; don’t miss it. Both are large-scale paintings, some 200cm by 300cm, and finely detailed.
Yet both have a drawback: nothing’s moving. That’s how hot summer’s day are; but whereas Impressionists sought to catch the fleeting moment, these Neo-Impressionists were painting stillness and solidity. It’s the same with two works by Paul Signac that would be group pictures if the subjects weren’t carefully ignoring one another: “A Sunday”, in which a couple have their backs to each other, and “The Dining Room”: a couple at the table, their maid standing silently by. Deliberately and maybe satirically, the dots embalm them.
One of the exhibition highlights is Seurat’s “Chahut”, a line of cancan-style chorus high-kickers, and presaging Expressionism in its angular look and forced perspective, smiles echoing turned-up moustaches, the back of a bass player. And yet for all its Pointillist shimmer it too is lifeless, a poster without the verve someone like Toulouse-Lautrec would have given it.
You can see the Pointillist kinship with Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire; you can’t imagine them painting a storm like Turner. The only works showing any action, apart from the stiff fluttering of flags, are a distant view of a bullfight and “The Iron Foundry” by Maximilien Luce, a magnificent celebration of labouring men at, more like a heroic Socialist vision than an Impressionist one. Many of the Pointillist artists were socially conscious (Toorop has an after-the-strike painting as well as “Before the Strike”); Georges Lemmen’s smoky “Factories on the Thames” features too – and ironically Kröller-Müller bought Luce’s one and hung it in the office of her husband, who had an iron ore business.
Post-Impressionism had many faces; the exhibition also includes works by Pissarro and Van Gogh. Pointillism was one, but it was in vogue for less than a generation – roughly 1885 to 1905 – perhaps because its leading light, Seurat, had died back in 1891 aged just 31. It makes for an intriguing display of close-up magic, even if it’s at its best in depicting the sort of still summer day when you want to be on the beach rather than in a gallery.
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Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists runs until 8 February 2026. Tickets from £27, discounts available, under 18 free, and pay what you like on Friday evenings to 19 December.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/radical-harmony-neo-impressionists
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