Pointillism is seen as part of the Post-Impressionism movement. The style was founded by artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Unlike impressionism, pointillists used only dots of pure color to create images.
A cluster of dots made up a solid image. Pointillism is not only a direction of art and painting, it is a specific technique for painting. The peak of development of the direction is considered to be the 1880s - 90s.
Origin
Art historians believe that pointillism, as an art movement, was a product of neo-impressionism. The year of birth of the style is 1885, the country is France, where the founders of the style studied and developed.
Most famous painting, representing the style - “Sunday on the Island” by J. Seurat. it is a recognized masterpiece: the canvas is over 6 feet high and 10 feet wide. Sera worked on it for about two years - painstaking work required precise drawing of small dots different color that made up the landscape. You can see the painting today at Art Institute in Chicago.
Symbolism as a style in painting
Representatives of the direction
The founder of pointillism was Georges Seurat, who was educated at the School fine arts in Paris. The traditional classical artist rejected impressionism in favor of a scientific method that he developed around 1884 and called "chromoluminarism." Based scientific theory colors of the French chemist Chevreul and the American physicist Ogden Rood. The method had been used before, but it was Seurat who began to systematically apply it as the main method of drawing images on canvas. Seurat's main student was the former impressionist Paul Signac. The landscape artist Signac was attracted by the methods of pointillism and divisionism, and after Seurat's death in 1891, he continued the work of his teacher. In addition to oil and watercolor paintings, he created etchings, lithographs, pen and ink works. Interestingly, Signac was one of the first buyers of Henri Matisse's paintings. 
Mannerism as a style in painting
Signac not only became the heir to Seurat's style, but also an experimenter - he worked with the distance between points, studying the features of its influence on the perception of a mosaic image by the eye. On Seurat’s canvases the dots are located at the same distance, in Signac’s they move closer and further away from each other.
The result of the artist’s experiments is the creation of dynamic, three-dimensional images by drawing dots at different distances.
Other famous representatives of the style:
Experimented with basic direction techniques. In some works he used thin, small dots of paint. In others, he used large strokes of paint to achieve a specific effect. 
French neo-impressionist, used pointillism in many works. His most famous paintings– series of works “Notre Dame”. 
He painted several paintings using the pointillism technique. The most famous and iconic work- a portrait of his wife and daughter. The artist's technique developed in the direction of increasing strokes and rendering them more coarsely. 
History of the Gothic style in painting
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh experimented with pointillism - he painted a self-portrait using the dot technique in 1887. 
Camille Pissarro
For 5 years he worked in the pointillism style. 
Style Features
Works in the pointillism style cannot be confused with anything else - the canvas consists of short strokes of a round or rectangular shape. Translated, the name of the painting direction means “to write with dots.” 
Color theory
In creating the style, Seurat used general position color theories – human eye mixes the colors of adjacent dots. When depicting objects on the canvas, dots of contrasting shades are used - blue and orange, red and green, yellow and blue. Thanks to this technique, objects are expressive. Adjacent colors do not mix with each other. The optical effect of the dots is designed for the color connections and transformations to be made by our eye.
Art Deco painting style
The painting “Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Seurat was a shock and the opening of the Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Thanks to the effect of color theory, the image turned out to be vibrant and multidimensional from a distance. If you come closer, the picture disintegrates into dots. The artist’s goal was achieved - he conveyed the vibrations of the air and the beauty of nature.
Divisionism
Seurat called this style of painting "divisionism" when he invented it, the name was changed through long time. How fewer points, the clearer the picture and the sharper the lines, just like the screen resolution on a computer monitor. In many ways, pointillism can just as well be called a science as it can be called an art. Pointillism used optical illusions to create images from many small dots close together. When viewed closely, the picture looks blurry and unclear; from a distance, the object depicted by the artist is clearly visible. The technique of applying an image to a canvas is compared to the pixels on computer monitor screens. 
Expressionism as a style in painting
Energy of the world
The idea of pointillists is to convey the energy of the surrounding world using an unusual technique of painting canvases. They didn’t plan to shock or surprise the audience, but unusual technique caused criticism and misunderstanding. The essence of the criticism is that the use of dots for painting turns painting into a mechanical, tedious activity, which kills creativity and individuality.
In children's creativity
Style is often used to develop children's creativity. Children are delighted with the transformation of the image, which is looked at from afar and at close range.
Georges Seurat A Sunday on La Grande Jatte 1884–86
The painting style that rocked the world of artists in the second half of the 19th century—neo-impressionism—in 1885 in France gave birth to a unique movement—pointillism. Critics spoke extremely unflatteringly about the technique, which eliminated the mixing of colors on the paintings. But pointillism found its fans.
Pointillism as a painting style
Pointillist paintings are easy to identify at first glance. They consist of individual point or rectangular strokes. The technique itself received its name from French word pointiller, meaning “to write with dots.”
Each point in pointillist paintings is located at a small distance from the others, and, therefore, its color does not mix with the color of the neighboring point. However, the work of connecting colors and turning individual points into a single canvas is done by the human eye. This is what our eyes do every second when we look at something.
The pointillists did not pursue the idea of surprising anyone with an unusual and rather complex painting technique. They sought to convey in their works the movement of air and the energy of nature. And they succeeded very well. However, there were critics who said that pointillism excludes creativity and turns painting into a tedious mechanical activity. But this is not true at all.
Georges Seurat and other pointillists
Fascinated by color theory, having studied the works of C. Blanc, O. Rude and E. Chevreul, the young artist Georges-Pierre Seurat decided to put his knowledge into practice, creating a canvas consisting of dots without mixing them. According to color theory, the human eye mixes nearby points of different colors into one color. For example, yellow and blue dots standing next to each other will appear to a person as a green spot from a certain distance. This can be seen in the example of the famous paintings J-P. Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte," which shocked critics at an exhibition of Impressionist works in 1886. The picture turned out incredibly alive, multidimensional. Contrasting dots create the effect of oscillating air. Seurat achieved the desired effect - he managed to convey the beauty and naturalness of the light-air environment.
The idea of J-P. Seurat was supported by artists such as Paul Signac and Henri Cross. And even one of the founders of impressionism, Camille Pizarro, worked in the style of pointillism for 5 years.
Henri-Edmond Cross Beach on the Mediterranian 1891
Camille Pissarro Railroad to Dieppe 1886
Seurat's pointillism opened up many possibilities for experimentation. For example, Paul Signac experimented with the distance between points. If J-P. Sulfur's strokes were approximately equal distances from each other, creating the effect of smooth movement; then in Signac's paintings the points either came closer or moved away from each other, thanks to which the effect was achieved energetic movement and the volume of individual elements.
Paul Signac Houses in the Port, Saint-Tropez 1892
Pointillism for the development of creative perception in drawing in children
The very fact that contrasting colored dots located nearby will appear as a single color spot when moving away from them causes genuine delight in children. And therefore pointillism is widely used in children's creativity.
A child needs a lot of time to acquire the skills to correctly hold pencils and brushes in their hands and draw smooth lines on paper. Failures in traditional drawing often lead a child to give up classes. But working with color is the most important part of learning, developing creative thinking, attention and memory. Pointillism techniques come to the rescue. The simplest of them is finger painting, when kids apply paint to paper with their fingertips.
Pointillism- style painting, which is characterized by an image using geometrically regular strokes of color, rectangles or dots. It got its name from the French “point”, which translates as “point”. The paintings of pointillist artists resemble mosaics, in which a whole image is created from small “shards” of color.
Many readers will have a question: is it possible to see the paintings of these artists live, where and when? Undoubtedly, in our age information technologies exists a large number of various resources specializing in cultural and art news, where you can find detailed information about current and upcoming exhibitions, festivals, performances, new films, music, etc. A very convenient poster is located on the unique resource of the international cultural portal EXPERIMENT, where you can easily find comprehensive information about the latest cultural news from many cities around the world, including ongoing exhibitions of pointillist artists. 
As a movement that developed within the framework of neo-impressionism, pointillism became a kind of experiment with color, in which, for the sake of an unusual optical effect, artist refuses the usual mixing of colors in painting (a technique used in most classic styles painting).
Pointillism arose in France in the 90s of the 19th century. The young artist Georges-Pierre Seurat successfully experimented with color theory, trying to achieve a unique effect: the disparate, unmixed colors of the painting were supposed to create the illusion of movement, vibration of air space and refraction of light. The debut of both him as an artist and pointillism as a style was the canvas “Sunday Day on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” The Parisians depicted in the picture look not just static figures, but living and convex silhouettes, and the landscape space between them seems to be filled with an oscillating air haze.
From another representative pointillism– Frenchman Paul Signac’s style has evolved. In contrast to Seurat’s geometrically correct strokes, equidistant from each other, Signac experiments with dynamics, placing dots closer, then further, or completely changing their size. 
We can see the result in his paintings “Pine Tree in St. Tropez” and “Harbor in St. Tropez” - and it is amazing. The image seems to roll over the viewer, born from individual strokes, growing into a coherent story full of rich dynamics.
During the birth of the genre, many art critics, yes and artists, who preferred traditional painting styles, criticized pointillism. It was believed that it suppresses individual style the creator, turning him into a craftsman who only needs to correctly distribute the strokes. However, over time, viewers’ interest in pointillist paintings grew not only because they “consist of dots”; the pointillist technique attracted people with its brightness, liveliness and unusual play with color.
Paul SIGNAC (1863-1935) - French painter, graphic artist, art theorist, public figure, one of the founders of neo-impressionism.
Herblay, Sunset, 1889
The term “neo-impressionism” appeared after the demonstration of the works of two young artists at the Impressionist exhibition in 1885: J. Seurat and P. Signac. Their writing technique was so different from that usual for the Impressionists that it became necessary to highlight this new direction in painting and give it a name.
This writing technique consisted of forming an image by applying multi-colored dots to the canvas. By this time, physiologists had discovered the mechanism of human perception of colors. For centuries, artists have known the principle of mixing paints of certain colors to obtain a new color. However, P. Signac and J. Seurat used a different principle for forming the necessary colors: not by mixing paints, but not by mixed separate dot application of paints of different colors, so that at a certain distance from the image the human eye itself would form a new color scheme. This specificity of pictorial writing leads to unexpected consequences: when reproducing these works, this effect difficult to reproduce because it requires a certain distance from the viewer to the image.
Moreover, as shown artistic practice, this technique allows you to create a new artistic image in landscape painting, but gives an extremely limited effect in the portrait genre. Perhaps that is why the portrait was not considered strong point creativity of P. Signac
Paul Signac.Sandy seashore
The first thing that attracts attention in “Sandy Seashore” is its unique painting style: the entire surface of the canvas, like a mosaic, is lined with colorful strokes. Hence the name of this painting technique - “pointillism”, i.e. painting with dots.
Papal Castle in Avignon", 1890
Painting by Paul Signac "Papal Palace in Avignon".
Small strokes of pure color visually merge into a single image, capturing the papal palace in Avignon. On the left you can see the famous Avignon Bridge, its outlines are born from a combination of shades of green. An adherent of Georges Seurat's pointillism technique, Signac places complementary colors of the spectrum next to each other without mixing the shades. As a result, our eyes see a series of small specks that merge together at a certain distance. Signac used the painting finds of the Impressionists, who took into account color changes under different lighting effects. Thus, the purple and pink shades that predominate in the picture are reminiscent of the famous views Rouen Cathedral Claude Monet, under whose influence Signac was early period of your creativity.
P. Signac - Notre-Dame de la Garde. 1848
P. Signac - Lighthouse in Groix. 1847
P. Signac - Bay. 1854
Paul Signac. "Women at the Well" 1892
The main place among P. Signac's landscape works is occupied by marinas depicting the Mediterranean coast of France.
Paul Signac. "Red Buoy" 1895
P. Signac was not only talented artist, but also a passionate traveler. He took part in sailing races with great eagerness and passion and often won.
Paul Signac. "Regatta in Concarneau". 1891
And he traveled a lot. Delightful views of Venice, Constantinople, and Rotterdam did not go unnoticed by the artist’s attentive eye and were recreated on his canvases. Watching pictures of seaside towns, constant movement waves, yachts rocking on the water, the artist sought to reproduce what he saw in his works. Maybe that's why sea paintings Signacs are filled with movement. Looking at them, it’s as if you feel the breath of the wind, you see how the sun’s reflections shimmer on the surface of the sea.
Paul Signac. "Port to La Rochelle". 1921
One of these lively, light canvases was his painting “Entrance to the Port of La Rochelle,” which he painted in 1924. The painting depicts a yacht rushing swiftly through the waves. Never have emotional experiences been reflected in a dark shadow on the artist’s works. The world created in the paintings remained filled with harmony and light. Although the beginning of the 20th century brought with it a lot of unrest. First World War, the revolution in Russia - the artist was acutely worried about all these events, adhering to progressive views.
In the 1900s, the artist painted many landscapes related to his travels to London, Venice, Holland, and Turkey.
Paul Signac. "Venetian Lagoon". 1904
Paul Signac. "Grand Canal (Venice)." 1905
Paul Signac. "Venice, morning." 1908
Art critics call Signac's Venetian landscapes "decorative fantasies", and in the Dutch they see a special tension of working life.
Paul Signac. "Dutch Mill". 1898
Signac also worked interestingly in graphics. He was sure that a horizontal line gives a feeling of calm, an ascending line - joy, and a descending line - sadness. With great desire and enthusiasm, he painted Paris, its bridges, canals, embankments - in general, all places associated with water; approaching the outskirts, he introduced industrial motifs into the landscape, depicting factories and their smoking chimneys.
Paul Signac. Port in Saint-Tropez. 1901
Paul Signac. Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille. 1907.
Around 1900, Signac abandoned the pointillistic brushstrokes of round spots and began applying paint in rectangular strokes of pure color.
Paul Signac. "Port in Marseille". 1906.
Signac's work is an example of amazing consistency. He worked in art for more than half a century, and all this time he ardently professed neo-impressionism.
A special place in Signac's heritage is occupied by works on art. He is the author of the book From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (1899). He authored a monograph dedicated to the landscape painter Jongkind (1927), as well as a number of prefaces to catalogs of exhibitions of artists of various movements.
Master class on introducing children of senior preschool age (6 - 7 years old) to pointillism “Goldfish”
The proposed master class on drawing to familiarize yourself with pointillism “Goldfish” is intended for teachers preschool education in working with older children preschool age(6 - 7 years old).
Purpose of the composition: “Goldfish” will be a wonderful decoration for the walls of a children’s room, or a gift for family and friends.
The presented composition is interesting option for teachers both for use in direct educational activities (drawing), and in joint or independent activities. Creating an image using dots contributes not only to the development of children’s fine motor skills and perseverance, but also to the development of imagination, thinking, and fantasy.
Purpose of the master class: introduce the features of creating images using the pointillism technique.
Tasks in working with children:
To introduce older preschoolers to an unconventional movement in painting - “pointillism”;
To teach how to create the composition “Goldfish” using the “pointillism” technique;
Develop imagination, motor skills, creative thinking in children of senior preschool age (6 - 7 years old);
Cultivate perseverance in work and aesthetic perception.
Description of the “pointillism” technique.
The name of the movement in painting, pointillism, comes from the French word pointiller, which means “to write with dots.” Artists who worked in the pointillism style applied pure paints to the canvas, not previously mixed on the palette. Optical mixing of colors occurred already at the stage of perception of the picture by the viewer.
Optical mixing of three pure primary colors and several pairs of additional ones makes it possible to obtain sufficiently greater brightness than by mechanically mixing pigments.
We invite you to master the “pointillism” technique using materials that are not entirely traditional for it - colored markers (felt-tip pens). Preschool children love to experiment with visual materials. The proposed method of depicting dots using felt-tip pens allows not only to develop fine motor skills preschoolers, their perseverance, color perception, but also increase the emotional background, since the image using felt-tip pens (color markers) does not require drying, there will be no spreading of paints or inaccurate mixing.
“Goldfish” using the “Pointillism” technique
Necessary materials:
1. A4 drawing paper
2. Simple pencil
3. Eraser
4. Colored markers (or felt-tip pens)
5. Frame for designing the work
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We suggest starting the first stage - creating a sketch of the future composition. The sheet must be divided by a horizontal line into two planes: water (about 3/4 of the sheet) and the bottom (1/4 of the sheet). It is better to locate in the center main character- fish. Children of older preschool age often associate “ Goldfish» with famous work A.S. Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” so the fish’s body may resemble a cartoon character or an aquarium goldfish.
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The sketch is ready, now it’s time to proceed to the second stage - coloring our composition with colored dots. We outline the outline of the fish: the main details of the body using frequent dots orange color, highlighting scales, fins, etc. After applying colored dots, the pencil outline must be erased with an eraser.
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Filling the fish's body with dots yellow color, closer to the outline of the fish you can place dots more often: the color will be more saturated.
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The fish is ready. We suggest you start coloring the algae. Don't forget that the only coloring element is the dot! The closer the currents are to each other, the more saturated color area to be painted. For algae, we suggest using green and light green flowers.
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Now you need to paint the remaining elements seabed: pebbles, shells.
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The final stage of our work is the application of spot water space. Use blue and cyan markers to fill the remaining space of the sheet. Near the fish, do not forget about several small white air bubbles, which are simply highlighted with a dotted outline.
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The work is done, the small dots have turned into a single composition. All that remains is to place the “Goldfish” in the previously prepared frame. We wish you success in your work.
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Using the same technique you can paint the picture “Golden Autumn”