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 Lighthouse at Honfleur | Detail from La Parade showing pointillism | A standing position of the Obverse | Morgenspaziergang | Vache noire dans un Pre |
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Miranda, Juan Carreno de
Spanish, 1614-1685 was a Spanish painter of the Baroque period. Born in Avil's in Asturias, son of a painter with the same name, Juan Carreño de Miranda. His family moved to Madrid in 1623, and he trained in Madrid during the late 1620s as an apprentice to Pedro de Las Cuevas and Bartolom Roman. He came to the notice of Velezquez for his work in the cloister of Doña Maria de Aragen and in the church of El Rosario. In 1658 Carreño was hired as an assistant on a royal commission to paint frescoes in the Alcezar palace, now the Royal Palace of Madrid. In 1671, upon the death of Sebastian de Herrera, he was appointed court painter to the queen (pintor de cemara) and began to paint primarily portraits. He refused to be knighted in the order of Santiago, saying Painting needs no honors, it can give them to the whole world. He is mainly recalled as a painter of portraits. His main pupils were Mateo Cerezo, Cabezalero, Donoso, Ledesma y Sotomayor. He died in Madrid. Noble by descent, he had an understanding of the workings and psychology of the royal court as no painter before him making, his portraits of the Spanish royal family in an unprecedented documentary fashion