Théo van Rysselberghe

Theo van Rysselberghe helped turn Brussels into a second capital of the avant-garde. In 1883 he was among the founders of Les Vingt, a group of 20 Belgian artists who invited the boldest foreign painters to show with them each year, and it was through them that Georges Seurat's huge dotted canvas of Parisians in a park reached Belgium.

Van Rysselberghe was converted on the spot. He took up the painstaking pointillist method, building portraits and seascapes out of small separate touches of pure color, and became its leading practitioner outside France, close to the painter Paul Signac. In his later years he loosened the dots into a freer, warmer brushwork and moved to the south of France. He died there, near Saint-Clair on the Mediterranean coast, in 1926.