Charles Angrand

When the young Georges Seurat, inventor of the dot-by-dot technique the critics called Pointillism, gathered a circle of like-minded painters in 1880s Paris, Charles Angrand was among them. He had come up from Rouen in Normandy to teach drawing in a Paris school, and in 1884 he helped found the Salon des Indépendants, the jury-free exhibition where Seurat, Paul Signac and Odilon Redon showed the work the official Salon would not hang.

Angrand painted in tiny points of colour like his friends, though his palette stayed quieter and more muted than Signac's bright contrasts. He knew van Gogh too, who admired his thick handling of paint and once proposed swapping canvases.

Then in 1891 Seurat died suddenly at 31, and something went out of Angrand. Grief-stricken, he left Paris for the Normandy countryside and for years stopped painting altogether, turning instead to dark, velvety charcoal and conté drawings of peasants and of mothers with children. He drew illustrations for anarchist papers alongside Signac and Maximilien Luce, a fellow Neo-Impressionist. Only around 1906 did he take up colour again, working near the light-filled manner of his old friends. He died in Rouen in 1926, close to where he had begun.