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One of the audacious things the French Impressionists did—much to the annoyance of Parisian art academy types—was take their easels outside. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro wanted to paint the ephemeral effects of natural sunlight, something that couldn’t be captured from the confines of a stuffy studio. So they ventured outdoors, straw hats and canvases in tow, producing what are now some of the most beloved paintings in the history of Western art.

But at the time, some of the Impressionists’ junior contemporaries thought they were going about this noble ambition all wrong and, well, missing the point. True luminescence was better achieved by scientific means, these younger artists thought. Radiance was an optical effect that could be produced through the purposeful side-by-side placement of pure, unmixed colors; painters could do better by experimenting with the color theories being developed by scientists at the time, such as Michel Eugène Chevreul and Charles Henry.

One such science-adoring artist, Georges Seurat, exhibited a monumental canvas at the eighth (and final) Impressionist exhibition in 1886. While working on this now-iconic painting, A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86), Seurat called it “a canvas of research, and, if possible, conquest.” The airy outdoor scene of fashionable Parisians picnicking along the Seine River caught the attention of the critics, not only for its sheer size (it was almost 7 by 10 feet) but also for the new technique it espoused.

“Painting with the dot”

The words “bedlam,” “hilarity,” and “scandal” were immediately used to describe A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. One critic, Henry Fèvre, condemned the painting’s stiffness and complained, “those trees, those leaves, it’s all made of wool!”

Fèvre wasn’t the only one who felt the speckled painting looked like woolen needlepoint embroidery. “[The canvas] consists entirely of small brush strokes of unequal size,” chimed in an anonymous reviewer, “which gives the impression that it is made up of colored woolen threads embroidered on the canvas.”

Others thought that Seurat’s grand manifesto just fell altogether flat. “When he approaches the problem of sunlight,” wrote art critic Emile Hennequin in the journal La Vie Moderne after first seeing the painting, “he fails miserably, not only because of the absence of life in the figures, whose contours are painstakingly filled in with colored dots as in a tapestry. They are painted goblins, just as unpleasant as the originals.”

It’s surprising, then, that the new movement led by Seurat and joined by Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce (among others) got its disparaging name from one of its biggest supporters: art critic Félix Fénéon. In a pamphlet that Fénéon wrote in response to the last Impressionist exhibition, he described this new technique that emerged among some of the younger artists. Fénéon called the movement Neo-Impressionism, but that wasn’t the term that his fellow critics chose to repeat.

What they remembered was a sentence weighing the benefits of different kinds of brushstrokes. Fénéon wrote that other brushstrokes may be better for rendering textures such as stiff grass or shaggy animal fur, but “at all events, peinture au point (French for ‘painting with the dot’) is unbeatable when it comes to executing smooth surfaces.” From then on, the meticulous style of precisely placing small touches of differing colors next to each other so that they could blend in the eye of the observer was called Pointillism.

“A maximum of luminosity”

If anyone had asked Seurat what he’d prefer to call this new method, he would have said Chromoluminarism or Divisionism. He disliked the fussiness that the term Pointillism insinuated, of a mechanical technician endlessly applying point after point to the canvas.

This was not a soulless formula, Seurat and his confreres insisted. While their ideas were based on science, these artists were pursuing colorful incandescence. “By the elimination of all muddy mixtures, by the exclusive use of the optical mixture of pure colors, by a methodical divisionism and a strict observation of the scientific theory of colors,” Signac pontificated on why their stippled technique was superior, “the neoimpressionist ensures a maximum of luminosity, of color intensity, and harmony—a result that had never yet been obtained.”

The Pointillists’ speckled dots were a short-lived phenomenon and lost some momentum after Seurat’s untimely death in 1891 at the age of 31. But their love of unbridled color soon lived on in the vibrant paintings of early 20th-century Fauvists.

“A terrifying revolution broke out (at the eighth Impressionist exhibition),” critic Jules Christophe wrote in an early biography of Seurat, referring to A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. “There were cries, but the Revolution, victorious, rested on the battlefield.”