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 :. | A standing position of the Obverse | Le Pecheur | Island Bowl Sunday | taskspelarna | Dancers on stage |
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wilhelm list
Siegmund Wilhelm List (May 14, 1880 ?C August 17, 1971), was a German field marshal during World War II, and at the start of the war was based in Slovakia in command of the Fourteenth Army. List was born in Oberkirchberg near Ulm, Weerttemberg, Germany in 1880 and entered the Bavarian Army in 1898 as a cadet. In 1900 he was promoted to Lieutenant and in 1913 he joined the general staff as a Hauptmann. He served as a staff officer in World War I. After the war List stayed in the Reichswehr and most of his assignments were as an administrator. In 1927 he was promoted to Oberst, in 1930 he was promoted to General-Major and in 1932 he was promoted to General-Leutnant. In 1938 after the Anschluss of Austria he was made responsible for integrating the Bundesheer into the Wehrmacht. During 1939 List commanded the German 14th Army in the invasion of Poland. From 1939 to 1941 he commanded the German 12th Army in France and Greece. During 1941 he was Commander-in-Chief South-East. In July 1942 he was Commander-in-Chief of Army Group A on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union.
Jean-Francois Portaels
(3 April 1818 - 8 February 1895) was a Belgian orientalist painter and director of the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Portaels was born in Vilvoorde. His father, a rich brewer, sent him to study at the Royal Academy, whose director, François Navez, took him on soon after in his own workshop. About 1841 Portaels went to Paris, where he was well received by Paul Delaroche. The Rose VendorAfter his return to Belgium, he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1842. He then travelled through Italy, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, the Lebanon, Judaea, Spain, Hungary and Norway. On his return to Belgium in 1847 Portaels succeeded H. Vanderhaert as Director of the Academy in Ghent. In 1849 he married the daughter of his first teacher, Navez, and in 1850 he settled in Brussels; but when he did not get the post of director of the Brussels academy, and wished, nevertheless, to carry on teaching as his father-in-law had done, he opened a private studio-school, which became one of great significance in the development of Belgian art. Once more he went on his travels, spending time in Morocco; he returned to Brussels in 1874, and in 1878 became Director of the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts which had so long been the object of his ambition. He died in Schaerbeek.
Francis Hopkinson Smith
Engineer, artist, illustrator, and short story writer American , 1838-1915 United States author, artist and engineer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, a descendant of Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Smith became a contractor in New York City and did much work for the federal government, including the stone ice-breaker at Bridgeport, Connecticut, the jetties at the mouth of the Connecticut River, the foundation for the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the Race Rock Lighthouse (southwest of Fishers Island, New York) and many life-saving stations. His vacations were spent sketching in the White Mountains, in Cuba and in Mexico.