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 :. | Detail from La Parade showing pointillism | Die Frau mit der Puderquaste | Study for The Circus | The Bridge of Port en bessin and Seawall | Grassy Riverbank |
Related Artists:
Panini, Giovanni Paolo
Italian Neoclassical Painter, ca.1691-1765 Italian painter, architect and stage designer. He was a highly prolific and versatile painter, best known for his numerous vedute of Rome, many of which focused on the remnants of the city's Classical past. Ceremonies and festivals often feature in his vedute, which thus constitute a lively documentation of contemporary topography, lifestyle and customs. In contrast to Bernardo Bellotto and Gaspar van Wittel, his treatment is picturesque rather than rigorous; he liked to enliven and animate his views by adding numerous figures. He worked exclusively in Rome and by the end of his career was the head of a thriving workshop that included the Frenchman Hubert Robert (in Rome from 1754) and Panini's son Francesco Panini (b 1738).
Samuel De Wilde
British 1748-1832,English painter and etcher of Dutch descent. He was the son of a Dutch joiner who had settled in London by 1748. On 19 November 1765 he was apprenticed for seven years to his godfather, Samuel Haworth, a joiner in London. However, he left after five years and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1769. He exhibited small portraits at the Society of Artists (1776-8) and at the Royal Academy (from 1778), where he also showed fancy pictures of banditti in the style of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. But the genre that he made very much his own was theatrical portraiture: he exhibited theatrical portraits at the Royal Academy almost every year from 1792 to 1821.
Joris van Son
1623-1667) was a highly popular Flemish Baroque painter of fruit and flowers, in banquet style on a plank, but also in garland form. He seems to have been influenced by Jan Davidszoon de Heem, since his subjects follow his style quite closely. According to Houbraken his paintings were prized for preserving summer plenty in the middle of winter. In a poem by Cornelis de Bie, it is written that his fruits would tempt a pregnant woman. His paintings hang in many european museums, and the Dutch RKD has over 70 known works by him on record. He signed his works JORIS VAN SON. His students were Frans van Everbroeck, Jan Pauwel Gillemans II, and Norbert Montalie.