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 :. | Model | Ein Abend in Grandcamp | Impression Figure | Impression Figure | Bath |
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Pierre-Antoine Baudouin
French Painter, 1723-1769 French painter. A pupil of Francois Boucher, whose younger daughter he married in 1758, he specialized in miniatures painted in gouache, which he first exhibited at the Salon of 1761. He was received as a member of the Acad?mie Royale in 1763 with a small gouache of a historical subject, Phryne Accused of Impiety before the Areopagite (Paris, Louvre), and he later painted illustrations of biblical episodes. However, he made his name as a painter of libertine scenes in contemporary settings, which he exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1763 until 1769. Some of his work is directly inspired by Boucher's scenes of pastoral love, but the ostensibly moral themes and careful attention to detail of such paintings as the Modest Model (exh. Salon 1769; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) demonstrate that he was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. His pictures were condemned for their immorality, both by the Archbishop of Paris, who in 1763 and 1765 ordered that works by Baudouin be withdrawn from the Salon, and also by Denis Diderot and other critics who accused him of pandering to the decadent taste of his patrons. Nevertheless, Baudouin was one of the most popular artists of the last decades of the ancien regime.
DELEN, Dirck van
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William Barraud
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