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 :. | End of the Seawall | Bathers at Asnieres | The Boy Wearing hat on the ground | Bather | parispromenad |
Related Artists:
August Strindberg
1849-1912 Swedish painter, sculptor and playwright. He had no art training, but learnt from artist friends after abandoning his studies at the University of Uppsala in 1872. The chief influence on him was Per Ekström, whose broken colour-spot technique he attempted to copy during his initial painting period in 1872-4 in Stockholm and on the skerry-islands Kymmendö and Sandhamn. Very little of Strindberg's early painting survives, but he had already found his special motifs: the sea, usually with turbulent waves; solitary trees or flowers on bare cliffs or sandy beaches in the outermost fringe of the skerries. After he stopped painting in 1874 he became Sweden's leading art critic, as well as the ideological leader of the radical Swedish artists' movement, which in 1884 formed the Konstnärsförbund (the Artists' Association) in protest against the Academy of Art. Prominent among the members were the painters Carl Olof Larsson, Karl Nordström and Richard Bergh. During this period, however, he produced sketches in words and pictures as illustrations to his own writings, which Carl Larsson was commissioned to do thereafter. From 1883 he stayed abroad, primarily in France and Switzerland, and belonged during a couple of long periods to the Scandinavian artists' colony in Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau in France. In 1886 in Switzerland he started photography and took a series of self-portraits that were intended for publication
Teofil Kwiatkowski
(February 21, 1809, Pułtusk - August 14, 1891, Avallon, France) was a Polish painter. Kwiatkowski participated in the November 1830 Uprising. After its suppression, he emigrated to France. His artistic work includes many images of Frederic Chopin, including a picture of him playing at a ball at Paris's Hôtel Lambert and Chopin on His Deathbed (1849).
Erik Johan lofgren
Erik Johan Löfgren (15. lokakuuta 1825 Turku -- 10. joulukuuta 1884) oli suomalainen taidemaalari. Löfgrenin vanhemmat olivat kauppias Johan Gabriel Löfgren ja Katarina Erikintytär o.s. Vahlsten. Hän opiskeli T. J. Leglerin johdolla Ruotsin kuninkaallisessa taideakatemiassa Tukholmassa 1842?C1850 ja sitten D??sseldorfin taideakatemiassa O. Mengelbergin ja F. Th. Hildebrandtin johdolla 1853?C1858. Löfgren toimi taulujen restauroijana Tukholmassa 1842?C1853 ja myöhemmin 1870-luvulla hän oli opettajana Helsingin yliopiston piirustussalissa. Hänen maalaustyylinsä oli lyyrisen romanttista ja hän maalasi muotokuvia sekä historian tapahtumista aiheensa saaneita maalauksia.