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 :. | Le Pecheur | A standing position of the Obverse | A Sunday afternoon on the is land of la grande jatte | Weibes und schwarzes Pferd im Flub | Gray weather, Grande Jatte, |
Related Artists:
BUTINONE, Bernardino Jacopi
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1450-1507
Jean-Pierre-Alexandre Antigna
painted The Fire in 1850-51
Eanger Irving Couse
American Painter , b.1866 d.1936 was an artist and founding member of the Taos artists colony in Taos, New Mexico. Couse was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where he first started drawing the Chippewa Indians who lived nearby. Couse attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design, New York. He left for Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Julian under Bouguereau. He lived in France 10 years, where he painted charming scenes of the Normandy coast. After his return to America he devoted himself to depicting the life and habits of the Taos Indians, a pueblo tribe in New Mexico. He reveals the poetical and philosophical rather than the savage and warlike side of the Indians, and his skillfully executed pictures are full of sentiment.