Girl with Flowers 

Henri Martin’s Girl with Flowers is made with oil on canvas, using a technique called pointillism. Look closely and you'll see it’s composed of countless tiny dots of pure color. This wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it was a conscious effort to capture the way light shimmers and vibrates in the natural world. Imagine the labor involved in applying each of those dots individually, building up the image layer by layer. It's painstaking work. Pointillism emerged at a time when industrialization was transforming society. Artists were grappling with new ways of seeing and representing the world. It's almost as if they were trying to break down reality into its most fundamental components. In doing so, Martin elevated what might have been seen as a simple pastoral scene into something far more complex and considered. This focus on the materiality of paint, and the labor-intensive process of applying it, invites us to reconsider traditional hierarchies between fine art and craft.