Georges Seurat
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 :. | Bathers | en eftermiddag pa la grande jatte | A standing position of the Obverse | Impression Figure | Model | Related Artists: Sir William OrpenIrish
1878-1931
Sir William Orpen Location
Irish painter. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin (1891-7), and the Slade School of Art, London (1897-9), there winning the composition prize of 1899 with The Play Scene from Hamlet (Houghton Hall, Norfolk). He became a friend of Augustus John and joined the New English Art Club. From very early years he had been an impassioned student of the Old Masters, and he went to Paris with John in 1899 to see Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre). In the following years his perception of their works Felice Giani Italian Neoclassical Painter, ca.1758-1823,Italian painter and draughtsman. He was a prolific painter who, with a team of artists and craftsmen, decorated palaces and public buildings in Rome, Venice, many cities in Emilia Romagna (especially Faenza), and in France. He worked in a distinctive Neo-classical style, creating sumptuous, richly coloured rooms, the paintings on walls and ceilings being surrounded with a wealth of antique ornament. Despite the turbulent era of revolution and war (1789-1815) he never lacked commissions, for which he chose subjects from the literature and history of Greece and Rome that were symbolic both for him and for his patrons. He was a prodigiously talented draughtsman, who drew constantly, Jeles-Eugene LenepveuFrench Neoclassical Painter, 1819-1898.
Studied under François-Edward Picot.
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