Georges-Pierre Seurat (December 2, 1859—March 29, 1891) was noted for his creative use of drawing media and for devising the techique of painting known as Seurat’s pointillism. He was a French post-Impressionist painter, but his large-scale work “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-Imoressionism. His painting style was out of the ordinary for his painting were filled with exquisite colorful dots and each dot was full of raditional brush strokes.
Seurat was born in paris, France. His father was a former legal offical who had become wealthy from speculating in property, his mother was from Paris. He left a few records of his childhood life. He began to study art from 1870s, he first studied art at the Ecole Municipale de Scuipture et Dessin, near his family’s home. In 1878, , he moved and followed a conventional academic training, drawing from casts of antique sculpture and copying drawings by old masters. Seurat’s studies resulted in a well-considered and fertile theory of contrasts:A theory to which all his work was there after subjected. But his formal artist education came to an end in November 1879, when he left for a year of military serice. After a year of military, he returned to paris where he shared a studio with his friend Aman-Jean, while also renting a small apartment. During the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing and he also studied the works of Delaroix carefully, making notes on his use of color.
In the summer of 1884, Seurat began to work on “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, which took him two years to complete.  “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” showed members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allowed the viewers’ eyes to blend colors optically, rather than haing the colors phisically blended on the canvas. The painting was 10-foot-wide (3. 0 m) and Seurat spent about 60 studies in the park sketching in preparation for the work. It is now in permannent collection of the Art Institue of Chicago. He made several studies for the large painting including a smaller version, ”Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, which now is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Then it was also the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Sunday in the Park with George.
Seurat died in Paris on 29 March, 1891, at the age of 31. It is still uncertain for the reason of his death, but it has been variously attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious, angina, and diphtheria, his son died two weeks later from the same disease. 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”. His 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 achieed through a 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 color and by lines pointing downward.