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 | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon | Detail of Dance | Les Poseuses | Bathing at Asnieres (mk35) |
Related Artists:
Gaspard Dughet
1615-1675 French Gaspard Dughet Location Italian painter. He was one of the most distinguished landscape painters working in Rome in the 17th century, painting decorative frescoes and many easel paintings for such major Roman patrons as Pope Innocent X and the Colonna family. He is associated with a new genre of landscape, the storm scene, although of some 400 catalogued works little more than 30 treat this theme. His most characteristic works depict the beauty of the scenery around Rome, particularly near Tivoli, and suggest the shifting patterns of light and shade across a rugged terrain. Dughet drew from nature, yet his landscapes are carefully structured, and figures in antique dress suggest the ancient beauty of a landscape celebrated by Virgil. Very few can be securely dated; his development may be inferred from his few dated fresco paintings and from the wider context in which he was working. Most writers, following Pascoli, have divided Dughet career into three periods. His first landscapes were a little dry (Pascoli); in his second period he developed a more learned style, closer to that of his teacher, Nicolas Poussin; his late works were more intimate and more original.
Pier Francesco Guala
(15 September 1698 - 27 February 1757), also known as Pierfrancesco and Pietro Francesco, was an eighteenth-century Italian painter active for the most part in the region of his place of birth, Casale Monferrato. Guala was the seventh of eight siblings of whom only he and a sister survived infancy. His mother died when he was five and he was brought up by his father, Lorenzo, who himself was a painter and perhaps related to the architect Sebastiano Guala. Pier Francesco Guala died in Milan on 27 February 1757.
Samuel John Peploe
Scottish Painter, 1871-1935,Scottish painter. He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy schools from 1893 to 1894, and then at the Academie Julian and Acad?mie Colarossi in Paris, where he shared rooms with Robert Brough. The influence of the rustic realism of French painters and of the Glasgow Boys is clear in landscape drawings and paintings executed in Edinburgh from the mid-1890s. His still-life studies reveal the influence of the work of both Manet and Hals, which he saw in European galleries, with their combinations of thick impasto and fluid brushwork, dark background, strong lighting and meticulous handling of tones. Between 1900 and c. 1910, when he moved to Paris, he painted in Edinburgh, on sketching holidays in Scotland and in northern France with John Duncan Fergusson, and exhibited in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London.