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 Circus | The Worker Break up the Stone | Model | The Post of Woman | Detail from La Parade showing pointillism |
Related Artists:
HESS, Heinrich Maria von
German painter b. 1798, Dsseldorf, d. 1863, Mnchen,German painter. After training (1813-17) under Peter von Langer (1756-1824) at the Akademie der bildenden Kenste in Munich, he painted religious subjects under the influence of Peter Cornelius. In 1821 he joined the Lukasbreder, and the circle around Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria, in Rome. Apollo among the Muses (1824; Munich, Neue Pin.), painted for Maximilian I, shows Hess to be among the most gifted of the German artists working in Rome. The influence of Raphael, glowing but carefully harmonized colours, gliding figures and drapery animate this early masterpiece. Among other important works from this time are exquisitely detailed and colouristically sophisticated, intimate character portraits with early Renaissance settings, such as that of Marchesa Marianna Florenzi (1824; Munich, Neue Pin.), as well as fresh and lively Naturalist landscapes from the environs of Rome, for example Campagna Landscape near Ponte Nomentano (1821-6; Hamburg, Ksthalle).
Thomas Heaphy
English Painter, 1775-1835 He trained at John Boyne's drawing school in Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London, and exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy from 1797. Following the success of a portrait of the Russian ambassador, Count Woronzow, he was appointed portrait painter to the Princess of Wales. Thomas Lawrence observed Heaphy's success and bought some of his pictures but had little cause to envy Heaphy's style, which owed much to the vocabulary of civic portraiture popularized by Joshua Reynolds (e.g. Portrait of a Naval Officer; London, V&A). Heaphy's largest project, The Duke of Wellington in Consultation with his Officers Previous to a General Engagement (Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing A.G.), was begun in Spain in 1813 during the Peninsular War and was finished in 1816. The engraving, which was intended to ensure Heaphy's fortune, was not released until 1822, by which time interest in the war had waned. Heaphy failed to finish his Battle of Waterloo (1816; untraced), another panoramic multiple portrait. Heaphy's other speciality, paintings of ports, markets, tradespeople and labourers, brought him great popularity between 1807 and 1811.
Jacobus Vrel
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, active ca.1654-1662 Dutch painter. Some 38 paintings, depicting domestic interiors, street scenes and a church interior, have been attributed to this enigmatic artist. Four copies after his works are possibly autograph; one drawing has also been ascribed to him. Over half of Vrel's paintings are signed or bear traces of signatures that were altered to read Johannes Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch, with whose paintings Vrel's work was often confused. Indeed, Theophile Thore discussed Vermeer as a townscape painter largely on the basis of works that were actually by Vrel.