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Georges Seurat approached painting like a scientist. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and influenced by contemporary theories of color and optics, he developed a technique of applying thousands of small, distinct dots of pure pigment that the eye, not the brush, would blend at a distance, a method he called Divisionism and that critics nicknamed Pointillism. His 1884-86 canvas A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a nearly seven-by-ten-foot scene of Parisians relaxing on an island in the Seine, took two years of preparatory sketching and remains the technique's defining showpiece.

He worked this way for barely a decade and kept much of his private life hidden even from close friends. Only in the last two days before his death did he introduce his parents to his common-law wife, the artist's model Madeleine Knobloch, and their young son, Pierre-Georges.

Seurat fell suddenly ill and died in Paris on 29 March 1891, at thirty-one; doctors could not agree whether the cause was meningitis, diphtheria, or infectious angina. His infant son died of the same illness two weeks later and was buried beside him in Père-Lachaise cemetery.