Theodore Chasseriau Art

French painter Théodore Chassériau (Born 1819) was an artist whose work had significant impact on the style of Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, and through those artists his work reverberates in the works of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. Chassériau was also important in the revival of enormous religious and allegorical painting in France, though few of those works has survived intact to day. Chassériau attained some success in his effort to fuse the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix and the Neoclassicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He started learning art in the studio of Ingres when he was still very young. He even followed Ingres to Rome in 1834. Around 1843, his subject matter and style began to show the influence of Delacroix who was Ingres’s rival. He also began to deliberately attempt to combine the rhythmical linear qualities with the coloristic methods. The 15 Othello etchings which he did in 1844 and his paintings of Jewish and Moorish life which followed his trip to North Africa in 1846 all show some influence of Delacroix, though he added some exotic qualities of his own. As time went by, his art became very popular, especially the framed Théodore Chassériau art which are still popular to date. Chassériau was a prolific draftsman throughout his life; he used finely pointed graphite pencil to execute his many portrait drawings. Collections in the US holding Chassériau’s works include the Museum of the Art Rhode Island School of Design, the National Gallery of Art of Washington, D.C., the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others.