French Pointillist Painter, 1859-1891 Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 ?C 29 March 1891) was a French painter and draftsman. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism. His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.  Related Paintings of Georges Seurat :. | The Harness Carriage | Le Pecheur | Impression Figure | Model Form Behind | Impression Figure of Landscape |
Related Artists:
Ernest Hebert
1817-1908 French Ernest Hebert Gallery He was born in Grenoble and died in La Tronche. His painting Mal aria was exhibited in the Salon of 1850-1851, and now hangs in the Musee d Orsay, Paris. Painted in a Romantic style, it depicts a family of Italian peasants escaping an epidemic by raft, a scene inspired by events Hebert had witnessed while in Italy. His student Paul Trouillebert was an important artist of the Barbizon School. The artist house is preserved in the Musee Hebert in the VIe arrondissement of Paris. There is another museum near Grenoble.
Joseph Vivien
(1657 - 5 December 1735) was a French painter of Lyon. He left his native Lyon for Paris at the age of twenty and found employment in the large atelier of Charles Le Brun, the equivalent of an academy. He made his reputation by his portraits in pastels, to which he gave a sparkle and immediacy hitherto unreached in that medium. He was received in the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1701, under the designation peintre en pastel. He was appointed counsellor to the Academy and provided lodging under royal auspices at the royal manufactory of the Gobelins. From Paris he visited Brussels. Vivien was taken up by the francophil Elector of Cologne and worked at Munich, as first painter to the Elector's brother, Maximilian Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria.
Nathaniel Hone
1718-1784 British Nathaniel Hone (24 April 1718 ?C 14 August 1784) was an Irish-born portrait and miniature painter, and one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. The son of a Dublin-based Dutch merchant, Hone moved to England as a young man and, after marrying in 1742, eventually settled in London, by which time he had acquired a reputation as a portrait-painter. While his paintings were popular, his reputation was particularly enhanced by his skill at producing miniatures and enamels. He interrupted his time in London by spending two years (1750-1752) studying in Italy. As a portrait painter, several of his works are now held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. His sitters included magistrate Sir John Fielding and Methodist preacher John Wesley, and General Richard Wilford and Sir Levett Hanson in a double portrait.[2][3] He courted controversy in 1775 when his satirical picture "The Conjurer" was seen to attack the fashion for Italian Renaissance art and to ridicule Sir Joshua Reynolds (it also included a nude caricature of fellow Academician Angelica Kauffmann, later painted out by Hone), and was rejected by the Royal Academy. To show his reputation was undamaged, Hone organised a one-man retrospective in London ?C the first such solo exhibition of an artist??s work. His great-grand-nephew shared the same name and was also a notable Irish painter, known as Nathaniel Hone the Younger (1831-1917).