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 | Young Woman Powdering Herself | Les Poseuses | Study for The Circus | The Maria at Honfleur |
Related Artists:
Charles Napier Hemy
English Painter, 1841-1917, British painter, He was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, of a musical family. He was trained in the Government School if Design, Newcastle, in the Antwerp academy and in the studio of Baron Leys. He returned to London in the 1870s. In 1881, he moved to Falmouth, Cornwall. He produced some figure subjects and landscapes, but is best known by his marine paintings. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1898 and an Academician in 1910, Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1890 and member in 1897. Two of his paintings, "Pilchards" (1897) and "London River" (1904), are in the Tate collections. He had two brothers who were also artists, Thomas Hemy and Bernard Hemy. He died in Falmouth on September 30, 1917.
Emanuel Salomon Friedberg
painted Jews Taking Snuff in 1885
Jean - Andre Rixens
French, 1846 - 1924