Théodore Chassériau

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Théodore Chassériau
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
EducationJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
MovementRomanticism; Orientalism

Théodore Chassériau (September 20, 1819 – October 8, 1856) was a Dominican-born French Romantic painter noted for his portraits, historical and religious paintings, allegorical murals, and Orientalist images inspired by his travels to Algeria. Early in his career he painted in a Neoclassical style close to that of his teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but in his later works he was strongly influenced by the Romantic style of Eugène Delacroix. He was a prolific draftsman, and made a suite of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello. The portrait he painted at the age of 15 of Prosper Marilhat makes Chassériau the youngest painter exhibited at the Louvre museum.[1]

Life and work

The Toilette of Esther, 1841, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 35.5 cm, Paris, Louvre

Chassériau was born in

mulatto landowner born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). In December 1820 the family left Santo Domingo for Paris, where the young Chassériau soon showed precocious drawing skill. He was accepted into the studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1830, at the age of eleven, and became the favorite pupil of the great classicist, who regarded him as his truest disciple.[4] (An account that may be apocryphal has Ingres declaring "Come, gentlemen, come see, this child will be the Napoleon of painting.")[5]

Santa Bárbara de Samaná

After Ingres left Paris in 1834 to become director of the

Paris Salon in 1836, and was awarded a third-place medal in the category of history painting.[6] In 1840 Chassériau travelled to Rome and met with Ingres, whose bitterness at the direction his student's work was taking led to a decisive break. While in Italy, Chassériau made landscape sketches and studied Renaissance frescoes.[7]

Vénus marine dite Vénus Anadyomène, 1838, Paris, Louvre
Andromède attachée au rocher par les Néréides, 1840, Paris, Louvre
Study of a Man (1832) - Musée de Montauban
Shakespeare
The Two Sisters
, 1843, Paris, Louvre
Henri-Dominique Lacordaire
, 1840, Paris, Louvre
Portrait d'Alexis de Tocqueville, 1850

Among the chief works of his early maturity are Susanna and the Elders and

Saint Mary of Egypt in the Church of Saint-Merri in Paris, the first of several commissions he received to decorate public buildings in Paris.[7]

Portraits from this period include the Portrait of the Reverend Father Dominique Lacordaire, of the Order of the Predicant Friars (1840), and

The Two Sisters
(1843), which depicts Chassériau's sisters Adèle and Aline.

Throughout his life he was a prolific draftsman; his many portrait drawings executed with a finely pointed graphite pencil are close in style to those of Ingres.[9] He also created a body of 29 prints, including a group of eighteen etchings of subjects from Shakespeare's Othello in 1844.[10]

He exhibited the colossal portrait

Cour des Comptes, commissioned by the state in 1844 and completed in 1848. He followed the example of Delacroix in executing this work in oil on plaster, rather than in fresco.[7] This work was heavily damaged in May 1871 by a fire set during the Commune
, and only fragments could be recovered; these are preserved in the Louvre.

After a period of ill health, exacerbated by his exhausting work on commissions for murals to decorate the Churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, Chassériau died at the age of 37 in Paris, on October 8, 1856. He is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.

Technique and style

Chassériau's art has often been characterized as an attempt to reconcile the classicism of Ingres with the romanticism of Delacroix.[11] In composing his narrative paintings, his concern for the decorative arrangement of figures and the creation of a mood took precedence over narrative coherence. His preferred method of working was to study his model carefully and then draw from memory.[12] He favored the serpentine pose, especially for his female figures. Art historian Jonathan P. Ribner calls "the inclined neck and bent knee" Chassériau's "signature motif" and says that "his command of foreshortening and three-dimensional composition remained uneven to the end, and this limitation is reflected in the tenacity of his ... inclination toward flattened, stylized poses."[12] According to Léon Rosenthal, Chassériau was "much less concerned with bringing heroes to life or developing characters than desirous of producing subtle and infinitely rich impressions suggested to him by the themes he chooses".[12]

Legacy

His work had a significant impact on the style of

Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, and—through those artists' influence—reverberations in the work of Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse.[13]
There is in Paris a Society for the painter: Association des Amis de Théodore Chassériau.

Works of Chassériau are in the

.

Exhibitions

Selected works

Gallery

  • Portrait de la comtesse de La Tour Maubourg par Théodore Chassériau.
    Portrait de la comtesse de La Tour Maubourg, 1841,
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Peace, Protector of the Arts and of the Tilling of the Soil, 1844–1848, oil on plaster transferred to canvas. A surviving fragment of the Cour des Comptes decorations.
    Peace, Protector of the Arts and of the Tilling of the Soil, 1844–1848, oil on plaster transferred to canvas. A surviving fragment of the Cour des Comptes decorations.
  • Othello and Desdemona in Venice, 1850, oil on wood, 25 x 20 cm, Louvre, Paris. Another work inspired by Shakespeare
    Shakespeare
  • Deux jeunes juives de Constantine berçant un enfant par Théodore Chassériau.
    Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, 1851,
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • Orientalist Interior, ca. 1851–1852, oil on wood, 49 x 39 cm
    Orientalist Interior, ca. 1851–1852, oil on wood, 49 x 39 cm
  • Tepidarium, 1853, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay
    Tepidarium, 1853, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay
  • Portrait of Mme Borg de Balsan
    Portrait of Mme Borg de Balsan, 1847, pencil on paper, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Portrait d'Alphonse de Lamartine
    Portrait d'Alphonse de Lamartine, 1844, pencil on paper
  • The Child & the doll
    The Child and the Doll, portrait of Laure Stéphanie Pierrugues, 1836, oil on canvas, 79,5 x 57 cm

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Jean-Baptiste Nouvion, Chassériau Correspondance oubliée, preface by Marianne de Tolentino, Paris, Les Amis de Théodore Chassériau, 2014
  2. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, p. 163.
  3. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, pp. 58, 163.
  4. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, p. 168.
  5. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, pp. 60, 168.
  6. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, p. 170.
  7. ^ a b c Rosenthal.
  8. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, p. 53.
  9. ^ Prat 1989, p. 5.
  10. ^ Fisher 1979, p. 13.
  11. ^ Rosenblum 1989, p. 32.
  12. ^ a b c Ribner, Jonathan P. (1994). "Chassériau’s Juvenilia: Some Early Works by an 'Enfant du Siècle'". Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, 57(2), 219–238.
  13. ^ Guégan et al. 2002, p. 287.

References

  • Fisher, Jay M. (1979). Théodore Chassériau: Illustrations for Othello. Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art. .
  • Guégan, Stéphane; .
  • Miller, Peter Benson (2004). "By the Sword and the Plow: Théodore Chassériau's Cour des Comptes Murals and Algeria," The Art Bulletin vol. 86, no. 4 (Dec. 2004), pp. 690–718.
  • Prat, Louis-Antoine. n.d. Theodore Chassériau, 1819-1856: dessins conserves en dehors du Louvre. Paris: Galerie de Bayser [1989?]. .
  • Rosenblum, Robert (1989). Paintings in the Musée d'Orsay. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. .
  • Rosenthal, Donald A. "Chassériau, Théodore". Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web.

Further reading

External links

Media related to Théodore Chassériau at Wikimedia Commons Media related to Paintings by Théodore Chassériau at Wikimedia Commons