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 :. | Standing Female Nude | The Youngster Wearing hat sat on the Lawn | Port en Bessin, Sunday | Die Rede von Grandcamp | A Sunday on La Grande jatte (mk39) |
Related Artists:
PERUGINO, Pietro
Italian painter, Umbrian school (b. 1450, Citta della Pieve, d. 1523, Perugia). Italian painter and draughtsman. He was active in Perugia, Florence and Rome in the late 15th century and early 16th. Although he is now known mainly as the teacher of Raphael, he made a significant contribution to the development of painting from the style of the Early Renaissance to the High Renaissance. The compositional model he introduced, combining the Florentine figural style with an Umbrian use of structure and space,
BLANCHARD, Jacques
French Baroque Era Painter, 1600-1638 He trained with his maternal uncle Nicolas Bollery (c. 1550/60-1630) from 1613 to 1618. He then set off for Italy but stopped at Lyon to work in the studio of Horace Le Blanc. Le Blanc left for Paris in 1623, and Blanchard is known to have finished a number of his works left in Lyon, including perhaps the Virgin and Child with a Bishop and a Woman Holding a Baby (Lyon, St Denis). At the end of October 1624 he reached Rome in the company of his brother Jean Blanchard, remaining there until April or May 1626. He was then in Venice until 1628, when he returned to Lyon via Turin.
Michael Wolgemut
German Northern Renaissance Painter and Printmaker, ca.1434-1519,German painter and printmaker, was born and died in Nuremberg.Little is known of Wolgemut's private life. He trained with his father Valentin Wolgemut (who died in 1469 or 1470) and in 1472 he married the widow of his former apprentice-master, the painter Hans Pleydenwurff, whose son Wilhelm worked as an assistant, and from 1491 a partner, to his stepfather. Some consider Wilhelm Pleydenwurff a finer artist than Wolgemut, however he died in January 1494, when he was probably still in his thirties. Wilhelm's oeuvre remains unclear, though works in various media have been attributed to him. The importance of Wolgemut as an artist rests, not only on his own individual works, but also on the fact that he was the head of a large workshop, in which many different branches of the fine arts were carried on by a great number of pupil-assistants, including Albrecht Durer, who completed an apprenticeship with him between 1486-9.