The Belgian artist Georges Lemmen (1865-1916) abandons very early his studies of drawing, fearing that an academic training would paralyze him. In 1888, he becomes member of the Cercle Les XX and participates the following year, for the first time, in their annual exhibition as well as at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris.

Around the same time, Lemmen develops a pointillist style after seeing George Seurat’s Un Dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, the monumental pointillist scene that indelibly impacted the course of modern art, at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels in 1887. Lemmen adheres to this aesthetic because he finds there the objectivity of a pictorial method that satisfies his mind and his taste for experimentation. Even more, the interiority that he discovers in the work of Seurat holds his attention.

However, while taking as model the painter of the Grande Jatte, Lemmen expresses his taste for stylization and for the japonising arrangement that brings him closer to the Nabis. As early as 1894, he adopts a critical distance from the divisionist technique that he judges too systematic. Attracted like other members of Les XX by the Arts & Crafts Movement, Lemmen devotes to that a large part of his talent and of his research.

His pointillist period has thus been rather short but we owe him some remarkable landscapes as well as beautiful personal portraits of his close ones and charming interior scenes.