But in the 1880s a young man called Georges Seurat went even further.

He was fascinated by new theories about light and colour. So, rather than adopting the Impressionist method of painting reality as it truly looked, he tried to paint reality as it existed according to science.

And there they painted the world as they actually saw it, with all the changing light, fog, shadow, blur, and movement of real life, rather than how they were "supposed" to see it.

And instead of the grand themes of Academic art, they painted scenes from ordinary life.

Upon its completion in 1886 the critics and the public were divided — this sensitive, studious young Seurat had produced something entirely new.

Some called his work stiff, formal, meaningless, needlessly strange, and too intellectual; others hailed it as an artistic revelation.

Rather than mixing pigments, as had been done since time immemorial, Seurat separated his images into thousands of points of pure, unmixed colour, which the human eye would then blend together.

He spent two years working on the first masterpiece of this radical new style...

But this wasn't just for effect.

Seurat, Signac and co believed this to be a more scientifically accurate representation of reality — at least, according to the latest theories.

But it remained a controversial, largely unpopular style.

Is that a fair comment?

The leading Impressionists, including Monet and Renoir, condemned Pointillism.

To the Impressionists it may have seemed like a mockery of their work, turning what was human and emotional into something cold and systematic.

So... was Pointillism a gimmick?

Perhaps it was just an artistic experiment inspired by new scientific ideas with no real meaning.

As one critic said of Seurat: "Strip his figures of the coloured fleas that cover them; underneath there is nothing, no thought, no soul, nothing."

And yet, in some strange way, Pointillism seems to anticipate the major scientific discoveries of the 20th century — the atomic bomb most of all, perhaps — and its associated consequences.

This is not just a gimmick; it is a different way of understanding the world altogether.

But we shouldn't be surprised, for Pointillism as an art style was directly based on the pioneering work of scientists and mathematicians, much of which challenged long-held beliefs about the nature of light and colour.

Pointillism was an attempt to be scientifically truthful.

The Romantics resisted the Enlightenment and the rise of Science, Reason, and Industry — they painted humans insignificant in comparison with the inconquerable might and inscrutable mystery of nature.

But, by the close the 19th century, resistance had become futile...

An early indicator of the impact of science on art comes from the English prophet, poet, and artist William Blake.

In this picture he was criticising Isaac Newton; Blake thought his optical theories were depriving the world of the possibility of mystical, non-scientific vision.

In the 1800s everything from atoms to radio waves were discovered.

People had to realise that the world was not what they had previously believed, and that it was built from and controlled by invisible forces and objects.

Pointillism tries to deal with these strange new truths.

So perhaps Pointillism is, ultimately, a reflection of how science forced us to quite literally see the world in a different way.

Seurat, deeply affected by new theories regarding colour and light, could simply no longer see — or paint — the world as he and others once had.

Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism, which appeared during the Cold War and under the threat of nuclear annihilation, might just be the logical conclusion of Pointillism.

We have gone so far down the scientific rabbit hole that our world has become incomprehensibly complex.

And so Georges Seurat's ostensibly charming painting of a Sunday afternoon in Paris is rather darker and more engaging than one might suspect.

This is the vision of a previously stable world fracturing before our very eyes, as new knowledge threatens to tear it all apart.

The steady flow of scientific discoveries and inventions that have changed the world and how we see it, from photography and electricity to flight and nuclear fission, correlates with radical artistic developments.

Pointillism reminds us that as we change, so must our art...