French painter. He attempted to recreate something of the monumental Italian frescoGLOSSARYWall painting technique in which pigments are applied to wet (fresh) plaster (intonaco). The pigments bind with the drying plaster to form a very durable image. Only a small area can be painted in a day, and these areas, drying to a slightly different tint, can in time be seen. Small amounts of retouching and detail work could be carried out on the dry plaster, a technique known as a secco fresco. style in his huge decorative canvases painted in oil, but kept flat and pale in colour and simplified in the drawing to give something of the effect of fresco. He decorated many Town Halls and other official buildings in France, the most famous being the PantheonGLOSSARYTemple built in Rome aloout 25 BC by Emperor Agrippa. Having a circular plan, and spanned by a single dome, it was one of the most distinctive and original buildings of ancient Rome., Paris (1874-78, 1898, Life of St Geneviève), and the Hotel de Ville, Paris (1889-93). He was particularly admired by the artists grouped under Post-ImpressionismGLOSSARYPost-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. and Neo-ImpressionismGLOSSARYAn artistic trend that developed toward the end of the nineteenth century and became a revival movement for Impressionist painting. The Impressionist technique of juxtaposing small amounts of colour to create the impression of a total area that first becomes whole in the perception of the viewer was elevated to the supreme principle of painting and refined by Georges Seurat. Seurat wanted to give the spontaneous, impressionistic painting process a scientific foundation. His theories are underpinned by studies in physics, optics, and colour theory by Chevreul, Blanc, and Rood. Unbroken points of colour set directly next to each other (Pointillism, Divisionism, or Chromo-Luminarism) reflect not only the colour value of the depicted object, but also convey the colour of light as a reflection of the object, Other representatives of Neo-Impressionism include Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro and Henri-Edmond Cross. as a painter of symbolical and allegorical decorations who respected the plane of the wall and composed his murals in simple areas of colour and with a rhythmic linear pattern: with Moreau and Redon he was a leading Symbolist. He decorated the Library at Boston in 1893-95.
