In order to evaluate Seurat’s understanding and application of nineteenth century color theory, we must first become familiar with his contemporaries’ actual scientific findings. In an 1890 letter to journalist Felix Fénéon, Seurat credited his thorough understanding of optics to a variety of sources, such as ancient Greek art, Monet and Pissarro’s paintings, and essays by Charles Blanc, Delacroix, Chevreul, and Rood (Herbert 270). While all of these inspirations undoubtedly affected his work, Seurat owes most of his technological expertise to his contemporaries Ogden Rood and Michel Eugène Chevreul, who were indisputably the authorities on color optics in the nineteenth century (Gage 448). The first of the two scientists to publish his findings, Chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul boldly set specific laws on the way colors must interact in the eye and brain when perceived at a given distance. In 1839, he systematically presented his work in a report titled, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts. The section to which Seurat probably paid the closest attention examines the harmony of juxtaposed complementary colors. Chevreul’s studies confirm the well-known artistic phenomenon of balancing the complementary colors red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and violet, but he continues to uncharted territory by proposing that combinations of these opposing colors naturally appear pleasing to the eye (Chevreul 75). Unrivaled by scientists of equal caliber, Chevreul remained the authority in optical phenomena until the late nineteenth century.
40 years after Chevreul released his book, Ogden Rood experimented with contrast and complementary colors, and presented their effects in his 1879 publication, Modern Chromatics: Applications to Art and Industry. He, too, articulated that an abrupt contrast between complementary colors had a pleasing effect on its viewers, but went on to argue that such a contrast within a small space would enhance the effect (Marshall 312). Applied to artwork, this means that such opposite colors (ie orange and blue) placed next to each other in small quantities, but over a large surface area, naturally trigger calming sensations in the brain. In addition, Rood separated himself from the rest of the optic theorists by explicitly proposing the technique in which artists achieve the abrupt complementary color contrast by “placing a quantity of small dots of two colors very near each other, and allowing them to be blended by the eye placed at the proper distance� (Rood 15). Rood’s studies on color and his subsequent theories had a reliable basis in science and could therefore be read with the greatest of confidence, which we know Seurat did (Herbert 270). He took copious notes on the subject and even sketched a copy of the color circle represented in Rood’s book (Gage 451, Rood 164) (see image). This firsthand evidence of Seurat’s research reveals the vast extent of his knowledge on color theory, as well as the direction he intended to take in order to arrive at his precise formula for a painting.