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 :. | Dance | Impression Figure | The Post of Woman | Grassy Riverbank | mine |
Related Artists:
Willem van Aelst
(May 16, 1627 - in or after 1683) was a Dutch artist who specialized in still-life painting with flowers or game. Van Aelst was born in Delft to a family of prominent city magistrates. He learned to paint from his uncle, the still-life painter Evert van Aelst. On 9 November 1643 he enrolled as a master of the Guild of Saint Luke at Delft. Between 1645 and 1649 he lived in France. In 1649 Van Aelst travelled to Florence, where he served as court painter to Ferdinando II de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. At this time, the grand duke also employed two fellow Dutchmen Matthias Withoos and Otto Marseus van Schrieck, the latter also a still-life painter who probably influenced Van Aelst's style. In 1656 he returned to the Netherlands to settle permanently in Amsterdam. He became one of the most prominent still-life painters of his generation, which allowed him to live on the Prinsengracht. He must have at Amsterdam died in 1683 or shortly thereafter, as his latest dated work is from that year. Van Aelst taught Rachel Ruysch and several others.
Lo Scheggia
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1406-1486
Marlow, William
English, 1740-1813 English painter. From c. 1756 to 1761 he was a pupil of Samuel Scott, the topographical and marine painter; he also studied at the St Martin's Lane Academy, London. Throughout his career Marlow made oils and watercolours of London views, for example Near Westminster Bridge, Evening (London, Guildhall A.G.), which shows his balanced, classical sense of composition, sensitivity to lighting effects and smooth handling of oil paint. Between 1765 and 1766 Marlow travelled in France and Italy, making numerous drawings of ruins, which provided the subjects for many paintings finished on his return to London. An Oxcart in the Grotto of Posillipo (c. 1770; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.) exemplifies his bold, blue-toned watercolour style, with washes applied in loose blotches to emphasize the picturesque roughness of masonry and terrain. The handling has much in common with Canaletto, whom Marlow copied; a letter of 1771 from Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann (see 1956 exh. cat., p. 3) records that two views of Verona by Marlow were mistakenly sold as Canalettos. Marlow specialized in souvenirs of the Grand Tour, portraits of country houses, seascapes and river scenes. He visited many parts of Britain and Ireland in search of subjects, such as Powys Castle, Montgomeryshire (U. Manchester, Whitworth A.G.).