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 :. | Bathers at Asnieres | Bathers of Asnieres | Detail of Bather | Study for A Bathing Place at Asnieres | The Landscape of Port en bessin |
Related Artists:
William Roos
William Roos (1808 - 4 July 1878) was a Welsh artist and engraver. Several of Roos' portraits, mainly of notable Welsh figures, are owned by the National Library of Wales.
Robert Dampier
(1799 - 1874) was a British artist and clergyman. Dampier was born in 1799 at the village of Codford St Peter in Wiltshire, England He was baptised on the 20th of Dec. 1799 (LDS IGI record batch # C014402). He was one of 13 children of Codford St Peter's rector Reverend John Dampier (1763-1839) and his wife Jane. In 1819 he went to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as a clerk. In 1825, he was picked up in Rio to be the expedition artist on the English ship HMS Blonde under the command of Captain George Anson Byron. The ship was returning the bodies of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamemalu to the Hawaiian islands (known by the British as "Sandwich Islands"), after both died from measles during a visit to England. Robert Dampier spent 11 weeks in Hawaii painting portraits in oil paint and making pencil drawings of landscapes. After returning to England, he studied law at Cambridge University and then was ordained in the Church of England. He married Sophia Francis Roberts in 1828. In 1837 he became rector of Langton Matravers church. Circa 1843 they had a daughter Juliana Sophia, His wife Sophia died in 1864, and he married again in 1872. He had a daughter Frederika from the second marriage. Although employed a rector, he continued to sketch until his death in 1874. Major works by Robert Dampier are held by the Honolulu Academy of Arts and Washington Place, also in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Jan Rustem
(b. 1762 in Istanbul - d. 1835 near Dekštas, Lithuania) was a painter of Armenian, Turkish or Greek ethnicity who lived and worked in the territories of the Polish CLithuanian Commonwealth. Primarily a portrait painter, he was commissioned to execute portraits of notable personalities of his epoch. For many years he was a professor at the University of Vilna, the predecessor of Vilnius University. He was born in Instanbul, and a young boy was sponsored by Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski who invited him to the Commonwealth around 1774. Czartoryski paid for his studies in Warsaw, where among his tutors were Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine and Marcello Bacciarelli. Between 1788 and 1790 he moved to Germany, where he became a freemason. Two years later he returned to the Polish?CLithuanian Commonwealth and lived for some time in Warsaw, later moving to Vilna. Following the partitions of the Commonwealth, Rustem started working for the Common School of Vilna, which was later remamed the Imperial University of Vilna, as assistant to Franciszek Smuglewicz. After Smuglewicz's death, Rustem took over some of his duties. In 1811 he became a professor of sketching and in 1819 became a professor of painting. Rustem retired in 1826, but continued to give lectures until his death.