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 :. | The Sail boat | Sunday Afternoon on the island of the Grande Jatte (nn03) | The Flux of Port en bessin | The Grand Jatte of Landscape | Circus |
Related Artists:
Maujdar Khan Hyderabad
c.1866 r.1884-1911
Luis Melendez
1716-80 He assisted his father, artist Francisco Melendez, until 1737, when he began studying with Lewis-Michel Vanloo, the court painter to Philip V of France. Although accepted (1745) into the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he was expelled after his father denounced the academy in a dispute over a royal competition. After traveling throughout Italy, he returned to work for his father as an illustrator of choirbooks.
Vasily Vereshchagin
(Russian: October 26, 1842 - April 13, 1904) was one of the most famous Russian battle painters and one of the first Russian artists to be widely recognized abroad. The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited. Vereshchagin was born at Cherepovets, Novgorod Governorate, Russia in 1842 as the middle of three brothers. His father was a landowner of noble birth. When he was eight years old he was sent to Tsarskoe Selo to enter the Alexander Cadet Corps, and three years later he entered the Sea Cadet Corps at St Petersburg, making his first voyage in 1858. He served on the frigate Kamchatka, which sailed to Denmark, France and Egypt. Vereshchagin graduated first in the list at the naval school, but left the service immediately to begin the study of drawing in earnest. He won a medal two years later, in 1863, from the St Petersburg Academy for his Ulysses Slaying the Suitors.