Theo van Rysselberghe artwork • painting • previously for sale Oliviers à Cagnes

The Belgian painter Theo van Rysselberghe is regarded as one of the major Neo-Impressionists in the wake of Seurat. During a trip to Paris in 1886 as a young painter, he first saw Georges Seurat’s ‘La Grande Jatte', the painting regarded as the seminal work of Neo-Impressionism. He was so impressed by this that from that moment he too began to construct paintings from numerous small coloured dots. This produced a dreamy, transparent atmosphere, which lent itself exceptionally well to the coastal views and landscapes he painted. Van Rysselberghe was one of the few artists to adopt this technique to portraits, usually of family members and people he knew. Between 1897 and 1926 he devoted himself to painting a series of landscapes with bathers.