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 :. | Houses at Le Raincy | Bathers at Asnieres | bathers as asnieres | Circus | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon |
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Giovanni Lanfranco
(26 January 1582 - 30 November 1647) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. Giovanni Gaspare Lanfranco was born in Parma, the third son of Stefano and Cornelia Lanfranchi, and was placed as a page in the household of Count Orazio Scotti His talent for drawing allowed him to begin an apprenticeship with the Bolognese artist Agostino Carracci, brother of Annibale Carracci, working alongside fellow Parmese Sisto Badalocchio in the local Farnese palaces. When Agostino died in 1602, both young artists moved to Annibale's large and prominent Roman workshop, which was then involved in working on the Galleria Farnese in the Palazzo Farnese gallery ceiling.
Georges Rouget
Georges Rouget (1781, Paris - 1869, Paris) was a neoclassical French painter. After studying in the ? - ole des beaux-arts, Rouget entered David's studio in 1797 and rapidly became his favourite student. Rouget began his professional career as his master's main assistant until David's exile to Brussels, collaborating with him on the canvases Bonaparte at the Grand-Saint-Bernard, The Coronation of Napoleon (of which he made a copy signed by David), Leonidas at Thermopylae and on one of the three copies of the Portrait of Pope Pius VII. Though winning the second prize in the prix de Rome contest in 1803, he failed three times to win the first prize. He produced many canvases for the First French Empire and the Bonapartes, such as The Marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise in 1811. A minor painter, he spent his whole career producing paintings of great moments in French history for whatever regime was in power at the time. Many of his paintings adorned the musee de Versailles opened by Louis-Philippe in 1837.
Jacob Jordaens
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1593-1678 Jacob Jordeans was born on May 19, 1593, the first of eleven children, to the wealthy linen merchant Jacob Jordaens Sr. and Barbara van Wolschaten in Antwerp. Little is known about Jordaens's early education. It can be assumed that he received the advantages of the education usually provided for children of his social class. This assumption is supported by his clear handwriting, his competence in French and in his knowledge of mythology. Jordaens familiarity with biblical subjects is evident in his many religious paintings, and his personal interaction with the Bible was strengthened by his later conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Like Rubens, he studied under Adam van Noort, who was his only teacher. During this time Jordaens lived in Van Noort's house and became very close to the rest of the family. After eight years of training with Van Noort, he enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke as a "waterscilder", or watercolor artist. This medium was often used for preparing tapestry cartoons in the seventeenth century. although examples of his earliest watercolor works are no longer extant. In the same year as his entry into the guild, 1616, he married his teacher's eldest daughter, Anna Catharina van Noort, with whom he had three children. In 1618, Jordaens bought a house in Hoogstraat (the area in Antwerp that he grew up in). He would then later buy the adjoining house to expand his household and workspace in 1639, mimicking Rubens's house built two decades earlier. He lived and worked here until his death in 1678. Jordaens never made the traditional trip to Italy to study classical and Renaissance art. Despite this, he made many efforts to study prints or works of Italian masters available in northern Europe. For example, Jordaens is known to have studied Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, and Bassano, either through prints, copies or originals (such as Caravaggio's Madonna of the Rosary). His work, however, betrays local traditions, especially the genre traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in honestly depicting Flemish life with authenticity and showing common people in the act of celebratory expressions of life. His commissions frequently came from wealthy local Flemish patrons and clergy, although later in his career he worked for courts and governments across Europe. Besides a large output of monumental oil paintings he was a prolific tapestry designer, a career that reflects his early training as a "watercolor" painter. Jordaens' importance can also be seen by his number of pupils; the Guild of St. Luke records fifteen official pupils from 1621 to 1667, but six others were recorded as pupils in court documents and not the Guild records, so it is probable that he had more students than officially recorded. Among them were his cousin and his son Jacob. Like Rubens and other artists at that time, Jordaens' studio relied on his assistants and pupils in the production of his paintings. Not many of these pupils went on to fame themselves,however a position in Jordaens's studio was highly desirable for young artists from across Europe.