The National Gallery showed the Neo-Impressionist collection assembled by Helene Kröller-Müller, with Seurat's Chahut and Vincent van Gogh's The Sower in the Sainsbury Wing.
The National Gallery showed the Neo-Impressionist collection of Helene Kröller-Müller in the Sainsbury Wing at Trafalgar Square from Saturday 13 September 2025 to Sunday 8 February 2026. The exhibition was a collaboration with the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
When critics first saw Georges Seurat’s new style, they feared it might bring about the death of painting. He and artists such as Paul Signac, Jan Toorop and Henri-Edmond Cross painted in small dots of pure colour. At a distance the dots blend into tones and an illusion of light.
The technique, now called pointillism, simplified form and verged on abstraction. It went with radical politics, and the painters pictured the struggles of the working class against the industrial age.
Kröller-Müller, one of the first great women art patrons of the twentieth century, collected most of the paintings. She assembled the most complete ensemble of Neo-Impressionist paintings in the world and founded the Dutch museum that holds it.
Seurat’s Chahut and Sunday at Port-en-Bessin hung with Van Gogh’s The Sower, Théo van Rysselberghe’s In July, before Noon and Camille Pissarro’s Late Afternoon in Our Meadow. Anna Boch’s Evening hung too, and Tate lent Seurat’s Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp.