Art by Georges Seurat

Seurat built his paintings out of thousands of tiny, distinct dots of pure color, a technique now called pointillism or divisionism, based on then-current scientific theories about how the eye blends adjacent colors at a distance rather than the pigment itself blending on the canvas. His best-known work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), took roughly two years of painstaking, methodical dotting to complete, a stark contrast to the fast, gestural brushwork of the Impressionists he was reacting against. He died at 31, likely of meningitis or diphtheria, cutting off a career that had already reshaped how color theory and painting technique could intersect.