Breakfast

A bourgeois family sits stiffly at a sunlit breakfast table, a grandfather, a young woman, and a servant frozen in the morning light, every surface broken into meticulous dots of color. Paul Signac, Seurat's chief ally in Pointillism, renders the scene with cool precision, the rigid poses and glaring light lending a faint air of constraint to the comfortable interior. Now in the Kroller-Muller Museum, Breakfast applies the new scientific divisionist method to modern domestic life - the systematic flecks of pure pigment building a quiet, luminous, slightly airless picture of bourgeois routine.