Apple Harvest

What painting in dots actually means

Camille Pissarro met Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1885, when he was in his mid-fifties and already the senior figure of Impressionism, and took up Seurat's method. The National Gallery in London describes it as "applying small dots of colour alongside each other on the canvas to create an optical mixture" — instead of mixing green on the palette, you put a blue dot next to a yellow one and let the eye do the mixing at normal viewing distance.

The method came with rules taken from colour science, in particular the work of the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and the physicist Ogden Rood: put complementary colours next to each other, add yellows and oranges to sunlit areas, blues and purples to shadows. When the pictures of Seurat, Signac, Pissarro and his son Lucien Pissarro were hung together in their own section at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, the critic Félix Fénéon coined a name for it, Neo-Impressionism.

The Dallas Museum of Art argues that Pissarro worked hard here against the flatness the method could produce, and that "his dots are surprisingly active and diverse". The art historian Robert Herbert, quoted by the museum, took the shadow under the apple tree as the demonstration:

“The shadow has brilliant red, intense blue, intense green as well as pink, lavender, orange, some yellow, and subdued blues and greens… results in an abrasive vibration in our eye that cannot be resolved into one tone.”

He was already looking for a way out

In September 1888, while he was finishing this canvas, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien Pissarro in London. The letter is the reason the picture matters beyond its subject.

“I am thinking a lot here about a way of producing without the point… How to attain the qualities of purity, of the simplicity of the point, and the thickness, the suppleness, the liberty, the spontaneity, the freshness of sensation of our impressionist art? That's the question; it is much on my mind, for the point is thin, without consistency, diaphanous, more monotonous than simple.”

He was still looking five months later. In February 1889 he told Lucien he was searching for a way to replace the points, and that what he had tried was not quick enough and did not respond closely enough to sensation.

The picture is the method at full strength, painted by a man who had already begun to list its faults in writing.

He gave the method up

Pissarro did not stay a Neo-Impressionist. The National Gallery in London puts the reason in his own terms: he gradually abandoned the technique, finding that the laborious application of paint took away any spontaneity in painting. The Kunstmuseum Basel, which owns one of the major canvases of the period, dates the break to around 1890 and calls the whole episode short and intense.

The two museums differ on how quickly it happened, and the letters of 1888 and 1889 sit in the middle of the disagreement: he was arguing with the method years before he left it. What he kept, in Basel's reading, was the harmony between figures and landscape that the dots had taught him to build. He kept it with a freer touch.

Three paintings of the same orchard

Apple picking was a subject Pissarro returned to for most of a decade, and the Dallas Museum of Art sets out three canvases that show how far his handling travelled:

• Apple Picking, 1881, 65 by 54 centimetres, private collection — painted in a classic Impressionist manner.
• Apple Picking, begun 1881 and not finished until 1886, 126 by 127 centimetres, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki — shown at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in the year he completed it.
• Apple Harvest, 1888, the Dallas canvas — painted throughout in dots.

The subject stayed the same for seven years while the way of putting paint on canvas changed twice.

How much came before the canvas

The systematic method needed systematic preparation. The Dallas Museum of Art records a number of drawings, oil studies and a full compositional watercolour that Pissarro squared up for transfer, the traditional method of scaling a small design onto a larger surface by drawing a grid over both.

That watercolour, made around 1888, is about 17 by 22 centimetres, and its whereabouts are not known. A graphite and coloured-pencil study of the same date, in the Eunice and Hal David Collection, carries his notes to himself on the colours of the things in front of him: yellowish red-orange, green, violet, pink.

What fifty years of varnish had done to it

In 2014 the museum's chief conservator, Mark Leonard, removed the picture's varnish. A test window cleaned along the right edge showed the difference: about fifty years of varnish had gone dark and yellow and was masking the colours underneath.

This has a consequence for anything written about the painting before that year. Descriptions of a warm golden orchard throbbing with late-summer heat were describing a discoloured coating as much as the paint. The picture as it hangs now is cooler, sharper and more contradictory, which is what the dots were built to be.