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 :. | A Sunday Afternoon at the lle de la Grande Jatte | Weibes und schwarzes Pferd im Flub | Bathers at Asnieres | The Landscape of Port en bessin | The Peasant Hoe Soil |
Related Artists:
Louis Hayet
French, 1864-1940.French painter and writer. He was largely self-taught and initially earned his living as an itinerant painter-decorator. In 1881 he met Lucien and Camille Pissarro while painting landscapes near Pontoise and through them met Paul Signac in 1885 and Seurat in 1886. After a years military service at Versailles, Hayet moved to Paris in the autumn of 1887. There he began to apply to his paintings Eug?ne Chevreuls theories of colour contrast with which he had become familiar by 1881. A gifted watercolour painter, he also experimented with the ancient technique of wax encaustic, painting on a prepared cotton that allowed light to filter through. The paint surface of works such as The Grange (Beauchamp, France, priv. col., see 1983 Pontoise exh. cat., no. 1) retains a vivid tonal freshness, while the subject of crowds of peasants gathered before the Paris agricultural market reveals a debt to Pissarro. During the second half of the 1880s he became obsessed with the notion of passage
Kate Clark
1875-1922
Nicolaas Baur
who was born at Harlingen in 1767, was the son of Hendricus Antonius Baur, a portrait painter (born 1736, died 1817). He painted landscapes and views of cities, and many houses in Holland are embellished by his works. He also painted moonlight and winter scenes; and was particularly successful in marine subjects. He is considered one of the best of the later Dutch marine painters. He died at Harlingen in 1820.