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 :. | Impression Figure | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon | Bathers at Asnieres (mk09) | Bathers at Asnieres | Study for The Circus |
Related Artists:
Louis Anquetin
1861-1932,French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O'Clock in the Evening (1887; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Independants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called 'primitive' sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin's works were shown alongside Gauguin's and Bernard's at the Caf? Volpini exhibition in 1889,
George French Angas
(1844-1932), was a portrait painter. was an English explorer, naturalist and painter. He was the eldest son of George Fife Angas, prominent in the establishment of the new colony of South Australia. Despite showing remarkable talent in drawing, he was placed in a London business house by his father. He left on a tour of Europe and in 1842 published his first book, "Rambles in Malta and Sicily". As a result of this experience, he turned his back on the world of commerce, and directed his training towards a study of natural history, anatomical drawing and lithography. Embarking on his travels, he was soon to find his acquired skills extremely useful. Angas painted some of the earliest views of South Australia. Arriving in Adelaide in January 1844, he joined Sir George Grey on an expedition into the interior. He soon began an extensive series of journeys to the Murray River lakes, Barossa Valley, Fleurieu Peninsula and the South East, presenting his impressions of the newly established colony ?C its inhabitants, landscape, and its flora and fauna. Following a trip to New Zealand he returned to South Australia in 1845 and travelled to Port Lincoln. In the following year he returned for a short while to England. His next journey in 1846 was to South Africa, where he spent two years in Natal and the Cape, working on a series of drawings and watercolours which were published in 1849 as The Kafirs Illustrated. In this book were views of Cape Town, Durban, Wynberg, Genadendal, Paarl and Somerset West and plates depicting the local ethnic groups such as Hottentots, Malays and Zulus. He married Alicia Mary Moran in 1849, the marriage producing four daughters. In 1853 he was appointed to a position at the Australian Museum in Sydney, eventually becoming Director and staying a total of seven years. He was in Sydney when gold was first discovered near Bathurst, New South Wales. Travelling there to record the gold diggings he executed a number of drawings of the scenes that he found. These were published in Sydney and subsequently in London. Angas returned to South Australia in 1860, and finally went back to England in 1863.
Edouard Richter
French, 1844-1913