The Neo-Impressionists

Exhibition at National Gallery, London.

The National Gallery’s exhibition of Neo-Impressionists - sometimes known as pointillists, although Paul Signac, an early adopter of pioneer Georges Seurat’s technique of covering the canvas with tiny dots of colour, rejected the term - is a fascinating and glorious journey through the finessing of the technique and developments from it. Many of the paintings here come from the collection of an extraordinary woman who built up a huge collection of works from the time. Helene Kroller-Muller (1869 -1939) took a course in art appreciation with one of her children, and then developed a passion for art which led her to amass a spectacular collection after she married Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kroller and moved to the Netherlands. She bought many paintings by Van Gogh and by the Neo-Impressionists, and commissioned an architect to build her a museum to house her collection. The museum eventually opened in 1938, a year before Kroller-Muller’s death, by which time she owned around 11,500 works.

Thẻo van Rysselberghe