[citation needed] Charles Henry, a mathematician, inventor, esthetician, and intimate friend of the Symbolist and anarchist writers Félix Fénéon and Gustave Kahn, met Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro during the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886.
Henry and Seurat were in agreement that the basic elements of art—the line, particle of color, like words—could be treated autonomously, each possessing an abstract value independent of one another, if so chose the artist.
In 1889 Fénéon noted that Seurat knew that the line, independent of its topographical role, possesses an assessable abstract value, in addition, to the individual pieces of color, and the relation of both to the observer's emotion.
The decomposition of spectral light expressed in Neo-Impressionist color theory of Paul Signac and Charles Henry played an important role in the formulation of Orphism.
Late in life he filed for a patent to produce methanol from carbon monoxide[2] and founded Société Française de Catalyse Généralisée to exploit it.