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 :. | Seine-s Dusk | Study for A Sunday on the Grande Jatte | Study for The Circus | Personality in the Landscape | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon |
Related Artists:
Cagnaccio di San Pietro
Italian, 1897-1946,born Natale Bentivoglio Scarpa, was an Italian magic realist painter. He had his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Art in Venice, where he studied under Ettore Tito. Cagnaccio's early paintings were in a Futurist idiom, but by the early 1920s he had adopted a very smoothly brushed, nearly photographic style. His work, which includes portraits, nudes, still lifes, scenes of popular life, and religious pictures, shows the influence of the German painters of the New Objectivity. One of his best-known paintings, After the Orgy (1928) shows three nude women asleep on a floor littered with wine bottles, playing cards and cigarettes.
Manuel da Costa Ataide
(1762 to 1830), was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, gilder and teacher. He was an important artist of the baroque school in Minas Gerais and had a major influence on painting in the region, with many students and followers. His method of composition, particularly in perspective works on church ceilings, continued to be used until the middle of the nineteenth century. Contemporary documents often refer to him as a teacher of painting. In 1818 Ataede tried without success to obtain official permission to found an art school in Mariana, his home town. He owned technical manuals and theoretical tracts such as Andrea Pozzo's "Perspectivae Pictorum Architectorum" from which he must have studied technique. His art is characterised by the use of bright colours, especially blue. He was a contemporary and colleague of Antonio Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho). In the period 1781 to 1818 he completed and gilded Aleijadinhoes images for the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas.
BENSON, Ambrosius
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1495-1550 South Netherlandish painter of Italian birth. In 1518 he acquired Bruges citizenship, and in 1519 he was admitted to the guild of painters and saddlemakers there as an independent master, with the comment that he was 'from Lombardy'. He may have been from Ferrara, although he was originally called Ambrogio Benzone, taking his first name from the patron saint of Milan, the capital of Lombardy. He was probably attracted to Bruges by its commercial and artistic reputation. Initially he worked in the studio of Gerard David, by whom he was profoundly influenced, but after a few months the relationship went wrong and the younger painter brought a case against David. Benson's first marriage was to Anna Ghyselin, who bore him two sons, Willem Benson (1521/2-1574) and Jan Benson (before 1530-before 1581), both of whom became artists. From his second marriage, to Josyne Michiels, a daughter Anna was born, and he had two other daughters from various extra-marital relationships. Benson was an affluent and successful man: he owned several houses, for one of which he gave eight paintings in half payment (which gives some idea of the value of his works at the time). Benson twice received commissions from city magistrates to decorate their new county hall and was a member of the city council on three occasions; he also held important offices within the painters' guild, including dean (1537-8 and 1543-4) and governor (1540-41). His pupils included his two sons, and Joachim Spaers (1541) and Jacob Vinson (Fynson; 1549).