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 Person sat on the Lawn | Bathing at Asniers | Head Portrait of the Girl | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon | A standing position of the Obverse |
Related Artists:
Antonio Ciseri
(October 25, 1821 ?C March 8, 1891) was a Swiss painter of religious subjects. Ciseri was born in Ronco sopra Ascona in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland. In 1833 he moved with his father to Florence. He was admitted in 1834 to the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he trained under Niccola Benvenuti. In 1849, he began offering instruction to young painters, and eventually ran a private art school. Among his earliest students was Silvestro Lega.[1] Ciseri's religious paintings are Raphaelesque in their compositional outlines and their polished surfaces, but are nearly photographic in effect. He fulfilled many important commissions from churches in Italy and Switzerland. Ciseri also painted a significant number of portraits. He died in Florence on March 8, 1891.
Marie Bashkirtseff
(Russian: November 11, 1858 October 31, 1884) was a Ukrainian-born Russian diarist, painter and sculptor. Marie BashkirtseffBorn Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva in Gavrontsy near Poltava, to a wealthy noble family, she grew up abroad, traveling with her mother across most of Europe. Educated privately, she studied painting in France at the Acad??mie Julian, one of the few establishments that accepted female students. The Acad??mie attracted young women from all over Europe and the United States. One fellow student was Louise Breslau who Marie viewed as her only rival. Marie would go on to produce a remarkable body of work in her short lifetime, the most famous being the portrait of Paris slum children titled The Meeting and In the Studio, (shown here) a portrait of her fellow artists at work. Unfortunately, a large number of Bashkirtseff's works were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. From the age of 13, she began keeping a journal, and it is for this she is most famous. Her personal account of the struggles of women artists is documented in her published journals, which are a revealing story of the bourgeoisie. Titled, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, her popular diary is still in print today. The diary was cited by an American contemporary, Mary MacLane, whose own shockingly confessional diary drew inspiration from Bashkirtseff's. Her letters, consisting of her correspondence with the writer Guy de Maupassant, were published in 1891. The grave of Marie BashkirtseffDying of tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bashkirtseff lived just long enough to become an intellectual powerhouse in Paris in the 1880s. A feminist, in 1881, using the nom de plume "Pauline Orrel," she wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert's feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. One of her famous quotes is: Let us love dogs, let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures.
Evaristo Baschenis
1617-1677 Italian Evaristo Baschenis Galleries Italian painter. He came from a family of painters originally from Averara, Lombardy, but with different branches active in the provinces of Bergamo and Trentino, mostly specializing in fresco decoration of churches. He probably started working within the same regional tradition but soon came to specialize in still-lifes and moved beyond his familys limited and provincial style to create a richer and more complex art.