Seurat was inspired to abandon Impressionism, and instead wanted to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. However, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, due to his love of the modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure. Seurat wanted to avoid depicting only the "local", or apparent, color of depicted objects, and instead wanted to capture all the colors that interacted to produce their appearance.
Seurat was fascinated by the range of scientific ideas about color, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colors of a particular warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. He pursued the discovery that contrasting or complementary colors can optically mix to show more vivid tones, that could be achieved by mixing only paint. He called his technique Chromoluminism, which later became known as Divisionism.