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 :. | Spring | The Person is Sitting or Lying and black horse | mine | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon | The river Seine at La Grande-Jatte |
Related Artists:
LIEFERINXE, Josse
French painter, Provençal school (active 1493-1508 in Marseille) South Netherlandish painter, active in France. A native of Hainaut, in the diocese of Cambrai, he may have come from Lieferinge near Enghien (Claessens). He is documented in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence from 1493 to 1505, often being described as a 'Picard painter'. In 1503 he married Michelle, one of the daughters of Jean Changenet, the most prominent painter of the time in Avignon, with whom he may have trained. The last great representative of the 'School of Avignon',
Johann Gottfried Steffan
1815-1905 Swiss painter. He moved to Munich in 1833 after an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Wedenswil. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste and the Polytechnikum in Munich. He was impressed by Carl Rottmann's Italian landscapes and decided to devote himself to landscape painting. He travelled to Italy in 1845 and to Paris in 1855; he subsequently began to concentrate on painting lake and mountain scenes, for example Lake Starnberg in a Storm (1873; Zurich, Ksthaus), at which he was highly successful. He undertook numerous study-visits to Bavaria and Switzerland, often accompanied by his pupils Traugott Schiess (1834-69) and Otto Frölicher. In Munich Steffan became friendly with Rudolf Koller, Johann Caspar Bosshardt (1823-87) and Arnold Becklin, and under his leadership the 'Schweizer', as these artist-friends were known collectively, formed their own group.
Dankvart Dreyer
(13 June 1816 - 4 November 1852) was a Danish landscape painter of the Copenhagen School of painters who was educated under the guidance of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. Around 1840, he was part of the emerging National Romantic landscape painting scene in Denmark but as a result of his over-dramatic and excessively natural style, he did not fit the aestetics and the ideology of the period. After being widely criticized, he turned his back on the artistic establishment and passed into near oblivion. In 1852, when only 36 years old, he died from typhus. Posthumously, half a century after his death, his reputation was restored, prompted by the art historian Karl Madsen, and today he is considered to be one of the leading Danish landscape painters of his day, the peer of his more famous contemporaries P.C. Skovgaard and Johan Lundbye.