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 :. | Honfleur | Young Woman Powdering Herself | The Circus | Impression Figure | Die Rede von Grandcamp |
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HIGHMORE, Joseph
English Painter, 1692-1780 English painter and writer. The son of a coal merchant and the nephew of Thomas Highmore (1660-1720), Serjeant-Painter to the King, he was articled to an attorney on 18 July 1707. Bored with his duties, he attended Kneller's Academy from 1713 and in 1715 abandoned law, setting up as a portrait painter in the City of London. From 1720 he attended the St Martin's Lane Academy, where he was able to study contemporary French styles in art and design, particularly that of Gravelot. He read widely and mastered Brook Taylor's system of perspective (1715). He also attended William Cheselden's anatomy lectures and contributed designs to that author's Anatomy of the Human Body (1722).
Silvestro lega
Italian Realist Painter, 1826-1895 Italian painter. From 1843 to 1847 he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, studying drawing under Benedetto Servolini (1805-79) and Tommaso Gazzarini (1790-1853), then, briefly, painting under Giuseppe Bezzuoli. About 1847 he entered Luigi Mussini's school (see PURISMO), where the teaching emphasized the 15th-century Florentine principles of drawing and orderly construction. Then and for some years afterwards he continued to attend the Scuola del Nudo of the Accademia. After fighting in the military campaigns for Italian independence (1848-9) Lega resumed his training, this time under Antonio Ciseri, executing his first large-scale painting, Doubting Thomas (1850; Modigliana, Osp. Civ.). In 1852 he won the Concorso Trienniale dell'Accademia with David Placating Saul
George Shalders
1826-1873