Pointillism
Pointillism grew from the Impressionist school. It involves the application of paint in carefully placed tightly packed dots of pure, unmixed colour which by their juxtaposition give the impression of a gamut of colours. Seurat preferred the label Divisionism or Chromoluminarism, but a critic's somewhat pejorative description as "pointillism" remains. The technique echoes one developed by French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul (described in his book "Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours"), who was employed by a Parisian tapestry works; he discovered that the issue of improving the brilliance of a tapestry's colour was the way different colour threads were combined, i.e. a matter of optics not just the chemistry of the dyes.
