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 :. | Head Portrait of the Girl | Model | Impression Figure | Bec du Hoc,Grandcamp | Study for Le Bec du Hoc,Grandcampe |
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GIOTTINO (Giotto di Stefano)
Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1320/30, Firenze, d. after 1369, Firenze)
Jean Alaux
(1785 - 2 March 1864) was a French history painter and Director of the French Academy in Rome from 1846-52. Alaux was born in Bordeaux, the son of a painter, and the second of four brothers who were all themselves painters. he received his first lessons in art from his father, but went on to formal training with Pierre Lacour, then Pierre-Narcisse Guerin. He was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1807. From 1808 he entered works for the Prix de Rome but his energies were diverted when his elder brother, Jean-Francois Alaux (1783-1858), asked him to help with a large "neorama" (a type of Panorama) he was working on. Jean eventually won the Prix de Rome's first prize in 1815, with a work entitled "Briseis weeping over the body of Patroclus", a scene inspired by The Iliad of Homer. He subsequently became a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome from 1816 to 1820 (later becoming its director).
Johann Carl Wilck
Johann Carl Wilck (1772 - 1819)