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 :. | Gray weather, Grande Jatte, | The seated Teenager | The circus | Einfahrt zum Hafen Port-en-Bessin | Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte |
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Jan Weenix
Dutch Baroque Era Painter , Amsterdam 1640/42-1719 Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jan Baptist Weenix. Jan probably received his first instruction as a painter from his father, and it is possible that he helped finish certain of his father's works. He probably remained in Utrecht after his father's death. By 1664 he had become a member of the Guild of St Luke in Utrecht without, however, having submitted the required entrance painting, which he provided by 1668. There are several documented references to Jan in the late 1660s. He inherited a legacy along with his uncle, the painter Barent Micker, and other family members in 1667, at which time Gillis, his younger brother, apparently still required a guardian. He received another legacy in 1668, the year of his marriage, and in 1669 served as a witness for the inventory of the painter Jacob de Hennin (1629-c. 1688) in The Hague.
Isaac Ilich Levitan
Russian Painter, 1860-1900
Grigory Gagarin
Russian: 11 May [O.S. 29 April] 1811 - 30 January [O.S. 18 January] 1893) was a Russian painter, Major General and administrator. Grigory Gagarin was born in Saint Petersburg to the noble Rurikid princely Gagarin family. His father, Prince Grigory Ivanovich Gagarin (Saint Petersburg, 17 March 1782 - Tegernsee, 12 February 1837), was a Russian diplomat in France and later the ambassador to Italy. His father married in Saint Petersburg in 1809 his mother Yekaterina Petrovna Sojmonova (Saint Petersburg, 23 May 1790 - Moscow, 27 February 1873). Thus until the age 13 the boy was with his family in Paris and Rome and then studied in the collegium Tolomei in Siena. Grigory did not receive a formal artistic education, but took private lessons from the famous Russian painter Karl Briullov who at that time lived in Italy. In 1832 he returned to Saint Petersburg, became acquainted with Alexander Pushkin and illustrated his works The Queen of Spades and The Tale of Tsar Saltan.He also became close to the opposition Circle of Sixteen and Mikhail Lermontov.