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, | circus | Impression Figure of Landscape | End of the Seawall | Impression Figure |
Related Artists:
Frederick Sandys
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, ca.1829-1904 English painter, illustrator and draughtsman. He was the son of Anthony Sands (1804-83), a minor local artist. He began his artistic education with his father and attended the Norwich School of Design from 1846. His precocious talent was recognized by the award of silver medals by the Society of Arts in 1846 and 1847. He moved to London in 1851, when he first exhibited at the Royal Academy, but he continued to spend time at Norwich until the death of his parents in 1883. After publishing in 1857 A Nightmare, a gentle caricature of John Ruskin and his Pre-Raphaelite proteg's William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and based on Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
1780-1867 French painter. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres's work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original.
Jacquemart de Hesdin
French Gothic Era Miniaturist, ca.1350-1410 Jacquemart's whole career developed at Bourges (the capital of the Province of Berry) at the court of John, Duke of Berry. He was active in the Duke's service from 1384 until 1414 and made a significant contribution to the Duke's famous illuminated books, in particular the Tr??s Belles Heures du Duc de Berry, the Grandes Heures, the Petites Heures, and a Psalter, often working with the Limbourg brothers and the painter known as the Boucicaut Master. On 28 November 1384, Jacquemart was paid for the first time by the steward of John, Duke of Berry, to cover expenses he and his wife had incurred in Bourges, and he was also paid for his clothes for the coming winter. After 1384, he was paid a regular salary. In 1398, while Jacquemart was working for Berry in the castle at Poitiers, he was accused with his assistant Godefroy and with his brother-in-law Jean Petit of the theft of colours and patterns from Jean de Hollande, another painter who worked for Berry. Jacquemart is recorded as staying in Bourges in 1399. The Tr??s Belles Heures du Duc de Berry (also sometimes called the Brussels Hours, from the city where it has long been kept) is chiefly the work of Jacquemart. The book is described in an inventory of Berry's library dated 1402: ?? Unes tr??s belles heures richement enlumin??es et ystori??es de la main Jacquemart de Odin. ?? The Tr??s Belles Heures disappeared for several hundred years, but the scholarly consensus is that the manuscript in the Biblioth??que Royale at Brussels is the one described in the 1402 inventory. The Petites Heures is believed to date from before 1388, apart from a miniature of the Duke of Berry himself added later by the Limbourg brothers. Millard Meiss suggests that at least five painters worked on the book's illuminations, Jacquemart and four unidentified artists. One of these four is commonly referred to as the Pseudo-Jacquemart. Jacquemart's small painting The Carrying of the Cross (vellum mounted on canvas, 38 cm by 28 cm, dated before 1409) is in the Mus??e du Louvre.