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 Circus | Bec du Hoc,Grandcamp | Dancers on stage | Baders in Asnieres | Port en Bessin |
Related Artists:
Attributed to john wilson carmichael
1800-1868
Ludwik de Laveaux
painted Parisian Opera at night. in 1892 - 1893
Richard Bergh
1858?C1919,Painter, writer and museum director, son of Edvard Bergh. He studied in Stockholm, first at the art school of Edvard Pers?us (1841-90) and from 1878 to 1881 at the Konstakademi, where he met Nils Kreuger and Karl Nordstrem. His early work consists mainly of academically treated scenes from Swedish history and legend. In 1881 he left for France, studying in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and at the Academie Colarossi (1881-4); he made his debut at the Salon of 1883. In 1885, with Ernst Josephson and other members of the Scandinavian artists' colonies in Paris and Grez-sur-Loing, he became one of the main promoters of the Opponenterna, a movement of protest against the conservative attitudes of the Konstakademi; the following year this group formed the Konstnersferbund (Artists' Union), of which Bergh was a leading member throughout his life.