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 Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon | Suburb | The Post of Woman | Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, | Study for Circus |
Related Artists:
August Jernberg
(16 September 1826 - 22 June 1896) was a Swedish artist who emigrated to Germany. In his early years he mainly painted portraits, and historical or biblical pictures. In the 1860s he became a genre and landscape painter. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm 1843-1846 and then went to Paris, where he studied under Thomas Couture from 1847 to 1853. In 1854 he settled down in Desseldorf, and remained there until his death, with the exceptions of some shorter trips. Also his son Olof Jernberg (1855 - 1935) was an artist.
Lefebvre, Jules Joseph
French, 1834-1912
Niccolo Cassana
Italian , 1659 - 1714 was an Italian painter born in Venice and active during the late-Baroque. He trained with his father, Giovanni Francesco Cassana, a Genoese painter, who had been taught the art of painting by Bernardo Strozzi. He painted a "Conspiracy of Catiline" for the Gallery at Florence. Having painted portraits of the Florentine court, and also of some of the English nobility, Nicoletto was invited to England, and introduced to Queen Anne, who sat to him for her likeness, and conferred on him many marks of favour. He died in London in 1714