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 :. | ung kvinna som pudrar sig | Dancers on stage | La Maria, Honfleur | The Boy Wearing hat on the ground | A Sunday afternoon on the is land of la grande jatte |
Related Artists:
John Tenniel
English Golden Age Cartoonist and Illustrator. (1820-1914) English illustrator and painter. Impatient with the hierarchic structure of the curriculum at the Royal Academy schools in London, he left to follow a less formal education at the Clipstone Street Art Society's life and anatomy classes and in the British Museum's sculpture galleries and Print Room. His research into the history of costume and armour provided material for his early oils of chivalric scenes, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy (1837-42, 1851). Tenniel was among the artists commissioned to decorate the New Palace of Westminster, and he went in 1845 on a state-sponsored trip to Munich to study fresco technique. His contact with the school of Peter Cornelius while there confirmed his emphatic preference for a precisely drawn line.
Vasco Fernandes
Vasco Fernandes (c.1475-c.1542), better known as Grão Vasco, was one of the main Portuguese Renaissance painters. Vasco Fernandes was probably born in Viseu, in Northern Portugal, where he began his career in the team of painters executing the main altarpiece of Viseu Cathedral (1501-1506). Between 1506 and 1511 he painted the main altarpiece of Lamego Cathedral. After working in the Santa Cruz Monastery of Coimbra, Vasco Fernandes returned to Viseu and executed a series of altarpieces for Viseu Cathedral, considered his main works. Most of his paintings hang nowadays in the Grão Vasco Museum, in Viseu.
Fede Galizia
(1578 - 1630) was an Italian Renaissance painter, a pioneer of the still life genre. Fede Gallizi, better known as Galizia, was born in Milan in 1578. Her father, Nunzio Galizia, also a painter of miniatures, had moved to Milan from Trento. Fede (whose name means "faith") learned to paint from him. By the age of twelve, she was sufficiently accomplished as an artist to be mentioned by Gian Paolo Lomazzo, a painter and art theorist friend of her father, who wrote, "This girl dedicates herself to imitate our most extraordinary art." At a young age, Fede was already an established portrait painter handling many commissioned works. Perhaps it was her father's influence as a miniaturist that led to Fede's attention to detail in her portraits. Her treatment of jewels and clothing made her a very desirable portrait painter. She was often commissioned to paint religious and secular themes as well. Several of her paintings based on the deuterocanonical story of Judith and Holofernes, a popular theme in art of the period, survive in private collections. Perhaps her earliest was Judith and Her Handmaiden painted in 1596 which is now in Sarasota Florida at the Ringling Museum of Art. She also created miniatures and altarpieces for convents.