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 :. | Bathers at Asnieres | Study for The Circus | Georges Seurat | a sunday on la grande jatte 1884 | The Landscape of Port en bessin |
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JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste
French painter (b. 1644, Rouen, d. 1717, Paris). French painter, one of a family of painters. He worked in Paris in the studio of Charles Le Brun, whose manner he acquired and whose favor at court he shared. He is best known for his religious paintings; the most important are the series of four canvases for St. Martin des Champs, including the Miraculous Draught of Fishes
Inman Henry
American portrait, genre, and landscape painter, 1801-1846 The son of an English land agent who had emigrated to America in 1792, he studied under an itinerant drawing-master before moving to New York with his family in 1812. Two years later he obtained an apprenticeship with the city's leading portrait painter, John Wesley Jarvis, drawn to the artist not only for his skill but also for his collection of pictures, which at that time included Adolf Ulric Wertmuller's Danae and the Shower of Gold (1787; Stockholm, Nmus.). Inman worked closely with Jarvis, eventually accompanying him on his travels and serving more as a collaborator than an apprentice. Within this partnership Inman established a speciality in miniature painting. In 1823 he set up his own practice in New York and ceded miniature painting to his student and eventual partner Thomas Seir Cummings (1804-94).
Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema
(1852 C 15 August 1909 in Hindhead) was from 1871 the second wife of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema and a painter in her own right. A daughter of Dr George Napoleon Epps (who was brother of Dr John Epps), her two sisters were also painters (Emily studied under John Brett, a Pre-Raphaelite, and Ellen under Ford Madox Brown), whilst Edmund Gosse and Rowland Hill were her brothers-in-law. It was at Madox Brown's home that Alma-Tadema first met her in December 1869, when she was aged 17 and he 33. (His first wife had died in May that year.) He fell in love at first sight,and so it was partly her presence in London (and partly the fact that only in England had his work consistently sold) that influenced him into relocating in England rather than elsewhere when forced to leave the continent by the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War in July 1870. Arriving in London at the beginning of September 1870 with his small daughters and sister Artje, Alma-Tadema wasted no time in contacting Laura, and it was arranged that he would give her painting lessons. During one of these, he proposed marriage. As he was then thirty-four and Laura was now only eighteen, her father was initially opposed to the idea. Dr Epps finally agreed on the condition that they should wait until they knew each other better. They married in July 1871 and, though this second marriage proved childless, it also proved enduring and happy, with Laura acting as stepmother to her husband's children by his first marriage. The Paris Salon in 1873 gave Laura her first success in painting, and five years later, at the Paris International Exhibition, she was one of only two English women artists exhibited.