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Historical Artist - Théodore Chassériau (1819 - 1856)
Child prodigy, Theodore Chasseriau entered Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s studio at the age
of eleven. Before reaching seventeen, he had already won a third place medal at the Paris Salon
with his early images of female nudes. Chausseriau traveled to Rome with Ingres in 1840 where he
became interested in the Romantic art of Eugene Delacroix. After returning to Paris, he began
decorating churches and public buildings in Italian Renaissance style. Chausseriau visited
Algeria in 1846 and created drawings which later served as preparations for his Orientalist
paintings. In addition, he drew graphite portraits and illustrated Shakespeare’s Othello
with engravings. 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. He also
created a body of 29 prints, including a group of eighteen etchings of subjects from
Shakespeare's "Othello" in 1844. 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.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.
Contemporary French Artists
Art Galleries in France
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