Théodore Chassériau was a French painter. Early in his career, he created his historical and religious paintings, portraits, murals and Orientalist images in Neoclassical style. Later, the painter shifted to the Romanticism style.
Chassériau also worked as a draftsman and produced a series of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello.
Background
Ethnicity:
Théodore Chassériau’s mother came from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).
Théodore Chassériau was born on September 20, 1819, in El Limón, Samaná, the part of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). He was a son of Benoît Chassériau, French diplomat and spy, and Maria Magdalena Couret de la Blagniére.
Chassériau’s father came to Santo Domingo in 1802 to occupy an administrative post. When Théodore was a one-year-old child, the family moved to Paris where Chassériau was raised in the bourgeois atmosphere.
Théodore Chassériau had two brothers, Frédéric Victor Charles Chassériau, a councillor of state and Ernest Chassériau, a military man. Two painter’s sisters were named Aline and Adèle.
Education
Théodore Chassériau became a student of the classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the age of eleven. Chassériau had studied at the studio for four years till 1834 when Ingres moved to Rome in order to head the French Academy there. Chassériau was one of the most loved pupils of Ingres.
Career
Théodore Chassériau started his artistic career in 1836 from the Paris Salon where he presented various portraits and religious paintings, among which was Cain Accursed. Chassériau’s art received good reviews. Two more Salons at which the painter exhibited his paintings of nudes were the show of 1839 (Susanna Bathing and Marine Venus) and of 1842 (Toilet of Esther).
In 1840, Chassériau had a travel to Rome where he met his teacher Ingres who criticized his former student. Since then, two painters broke up their relations. During the trip, Chassériau explored the art of Renaissance frescoes and produced a lot of landscape sketches.
The same period, Théodore Chassériau began to adopt the style of Eugène Delacroix, especially his colour technics. However, Chassériau didn’t drop rhythmical linear qualities of Ingres.
At the Salon of 1845, the painter exhibited his Ali-Ben-Hamet, Caliph of Constantine and Chief of the Haractas, followed by his Escort which received controversial reviews. The next year, Chassériau made a trip which had a great influence on his artistic mind and work – he travelled to Algeria. There, he founded new subjects for his art and produced such paintings as Arab Chiefs Visiting Their Vassals and Jewish Women on a Balcony (1849). Another artwork of this period, The Tepidarium (1853), was inspired by the artist's trip to Pompeii in 1840.
The major project of Théodore Chassériau became the commission to decorate the grand staircase of the Cour des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay which he received from the state in 1844. During four years the painter had worked on the project, he produced many allegorical scenes of Peace and War. Unfortunately, the mural was completely destroyed by fire, except some little fragments.
The last monumental work of Théodore Chassériau, murals to decorate the Churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, remained unfinished because of the painter’s death.