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 :. | Sunday Afternoon of the Island of La Grande Jatte (mk09) | Detail of Bather | The Eiffel Tower | Young Woman Powdering Herself | The Post of Woman |
Related Artists:
Charles Cottet
Charles Cottet (1863-1925), French painter, was born at Le Puy-en-Velay and died in Paris. A famed post-impressionist, Cottet is known for his dark, evocative painting of rural Brittany and seascapes. He led a school of painters known as the Bande noire or Nubians group (for the somber palette they used, in contrast to the brighter post-impressionist paintings), and was friends with such artists as Auguste Rodin. Cottet studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and under Puvis de Chavannes and Roll, while also attending the Academie Julian (where fellow students formed Les Nabis school of painting, with which he was later associated). He travelled and painted in Egypt, Italy, and on Lake Geneva, but he made his name with his sombre and gloomy, firmly designed, severe and impressive scenes of life on the Brittany coast. Cottet exhibited at the Salon of 1889, but on a trip to Brittany in 1886 he had found his true calling. For the next twenty years he painted scenes of rural and harbor life, portraying a culture Parisians still found exotic. He is especially noted for his dark seascapes of Breton harbors at dawn, and evocative scenes from the lives of Breton fishermen. He was close friends with Charles Maurin, and his group included the painter Felix-Émile-Jean Vallotton. Cottet has often been associated with the picturesque seaside symbolism of the Pont-Aven School, though Vallotton famously painted Cottet as a leader of Les Nabis, beside Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, in his Five Painters (1902-3; Kunstmuseum Winterthur). Cottet was more explicitly the leader of his own small movement, the Bande noire of the 1890s, which included Lucien Simon and Andre Dauchez, all influenced by the realism and dark colours of Courbet.
Gaspare Diziani
(1689 - 17 August 1767) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Roccoco period, active mainly in the Veneto but also in Dresden and Munich. His earliest training was in his native town of Belluno with Antonio Lazzarini, then moved to Venice, to the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini and later that of Sebastiano Ricci. He was seven years older, but otherwise his career was contemporary with the Lazzarini and Ricci fellow-pupil, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Between 1710-1720, he painted a group of eight pictures that included the Mary Magdalene for the church of San Stefano in Belluno, and Entry into Jerusalem for San Teodoro in Venice. He also painted three frescoes on the Life of Saint Helena in the Scuola del Vin next to the church of San Silvestro. Dizianies celerity and technical assurance are evident preparatory oil sketches, with color applied in rapid and spirited strokes. He was also working as a scenery painter for the theater and opera in Venice, Munich (1717), and later in Dresden, working with Alessandro Mauro. Diziani was invited to Rome by Cardinal Ottoboni in 1726, to paint a emagnificent decoration for the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. The decoration is now known only through an engraving by Claude Vasconi. The Sala dei Pastelli in Ca' Rezzonico has an sotto in su allegorical ceiling fresco presenting Triumph of Poetry (Poetry surrounded by Painting, Architecture, Music and Sculpture).
Ivan Aivazovski
Russian artist .1817-1900