The artist Georges Seurat was a French painter and the founding figure of Neo-Impressionism, a movement which dedicated itself to the scientific representation of light and colour. Seurat left the Impressionist movement and developed his "Divisionist" technique in an attempt to bring formal structure to Impressionism. His goal was to demonstrate "optical mixture." He accomplished this by placing small dots of contrasting colours next to one another in his paintings. The effect is one of pure colour that blends in the viewer's eye, not on the palette or canvas. This technique is seen in the painting, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Seurat's paintings proved to be a great influence on the Post-Impressionists, including Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec.
