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 :. | en sondagseftermiddag pa on la grande jatte | The Dock of Corner | Bathing at Asnieres (mk35) | The Models, | fiskeflottan utanfor port |
Related Artists:
Livio Mehus
The Flemish artist (1627-1691) eclectic painter, author of landscapes, sacred objects, genre paintings and portraits embodies
joseph michael gandy
Joseph Michael Gandy (1771 - 1843) was an English artist, visionary architect and architectural theorist, most noted for his imaginative paintings depicting Sir John Soane's architectural designs. He worked extensively with Soane both as draughtsman and creative partner from 1798 until 1809 when he (ultimately unsuccessfully) set up his own practice. Gandy built little in his career, having a reputation as a difficult individual to deal with. However his work included the Phoenix Fire and Pelican Life Insurance Offices (1804?C1805, destroyed ca. 1920) in London, Doric House at Sion Hill in Bath (1818), and the remodelling of Swerford Park house in Oxfordshire (1824?C1829). Commercially he was a failure and served two terms in a debtors' prison, but his published and exhibited work was largely a critical and popular success. In 1821 he published two articles in the Magazine of Fine Arts on The Philosophy of Architecture. He intended to expand upon this subject in an eight-volume work entitled Art, Philosophy and Science of Architecture, of which his unpublished manuscript survives. His paintings show a dramatic use of two-point perspective and architectural precision, and also reflect his (and Soane's) fascination with Roman ruins. His architectural fantasies owe a clear debt to Piranesi and play upon historical, literary and mythological themes with a feeling for the sublime that is the equal of his contemporaries J. M. W. Turner and John Martin. He died in a private asylum in Devon where he had been placed by his family in 1839. Many of his paintings can be seen in the Pictures Room of Sir John Soane's Museum in London.
Cornelis Ketel
Flemish (Resident in UK) 1548-1616 Cornelis or Cornelius Ketel (Gouda, 18 March 1548 ?C Amsterdam, 8 August 1616) was a Dutch Mannerist painter, active in Elizabethan London from 1573 to 1581, and in Amsterdam from 1581 to the early 1600s, now known essentially as a portrait-painter, though he was also a poet and orator, and from 1595 began to sculpt as well. According to Ketel's biography, written by his contemporary Karel van Mander, he seems to have wanted to concentrate on the most prestigious of the hierarchy of genres, history painting, which included mythological subjects, but after he left France he is known almost entirely as a portrait-painter. Neither England nor Holland had much demand for large history paintings during his lifetime, and none of Ketel's histories or allegorical paintings are known to have survived intact, although drawings and prints survive. He did however significantly influence the development of the largest type of painting commonly produced in the United Provinces at this period, the civic group portrait