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 :. | Sunday Afternoon of the Island of La Grande Jatte (mk09) | Study for The Circus | Entrance of Port en bessin | The river Seine at La Grande-Jatte | Port en Bessin, Sunday |
Related Artists:
Bonnard, Pierre
French, 1867-1947 French painter and printmaker. He studied at the Academie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts (1888 C 89). In the 1890s he became a leading member of the Nabis group and came under the influence of Art Nouveau and Japanese prints. With his friend Édouard Vuillard, he developed the intimate domestic interior scene, a genre known as Intimism, depicting fashionable Parisian life in the years before World War I. He also produced still lifes, self-portraits, seascapes, and large-scale decorative paintings. In 1910 he discovered the south of France and began a series of luminous landscapes of the Mediterranean region. He was fascinated by perspective, which he employed in paintings such as The Dining Room (1913). From the 1920s he specialized in landscapes, interiors, views of gardens, and bathing nudes. He produced illustrations for the celebrated journal Revue blanche and decorative pages for Paul Verlaine's book of poetry Parallelement (1900).
Baglione
1573-1644 Italian painter, draughtsman and writer. He executed canvases and frescoes of religious and mythological subjects, and portraits. He was given important commissions by popes and aristocrats and sold his works to patrons in Italy and abroad. Bagliones arguably greater fame as a writer derives from Le nove chiese di Roma (1639) and especially from his Vite de pittori, scultori, architetti (1642), containing biographies of more than 200 artists who worked in Rome between 1572 and 1642.
Giovanni Ponticelli
Italian, 1855-1877