Life and work
Chassériau was born in El Limón, Samaná, in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo now the Dominican Republic. His father Benoît Chassériau was a French adventurer who had arrived in Santo Domingo in 1802 to relieve oneself an administrative position in what was until 1808 a French colony. Theodore's mother, Maria Magdalena Couret de la Blagniére, was the daughter of a 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. An account that may be apocryphal has Ingres declaring "Come, gentlemen, come see, this child will be the Napoleon of painting."
After Ingres left Paris in 1834 to become director of the French Academy in Rome, Chassériau fell under the influence of Eugène Delacroix, whose brand of painterly colorism was anathema to Ingres. Chassériau's art has often been characterized as an effort to reconcile the classicism of Ingres with the romanticism of Delacroix. He number one exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1836, and was awarded a third-place medal in the category of history painting. In 1840 Chassériau travelled to Rome and met with Ingres, whose bitterness at the guidance his student's make-up was taking led to a decisive break. While in Italy, Chassériau reported landscape sketches and studied Renaissance frescoes.
Among the chief workings of his early maturity are Susanna and the Elders and Venus Anadyomene both 1839, Diana Surprised by Actaeon 1840, Andromeda Chained to the Rock by the Nereids 1840, and The Toilette of Esther 1841, all of which reveal a very personal ideal in depicting the female nude. Chassériau's major religious paintings from these years, Christ on the Mount of Olives a referred he treated in 1840 and again in 1844 and The Descent from the Cross 1842, received mixed reviews from the critics; among the artist's champions was Théophile Gautier. In 1843, Chassériau painted murals depicting the life of 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.
Portraits from this period increase the Portrait of the Reverend Father Dominique Lacordaire, of the an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. 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 arein style to those of Ingres. He also created a body of 29 prints, including a companies of eighteen etchings of subjects from Shakespeare's Othello in 1844.
He exhibited the colossal portrait Ali-Ben-Hamet, Caliph of Constantine and Chief of the Haractas, Followed by his Escort in the Salon of 1845, where it received equivocal reviews. In 1846, Chassériau made his first trip to Algeria. From sketches made on this and subsequent trips he painted such(a) subjects as Arab Chiefs Visiting Their Vassals and Jewish Women on a Balcony both 1849, now in the Musée d'Orsay, depicts a large group of women drying themselves after bathing, in an architectural creation inspired by the artist's trip in 1840 to Pompeii. His near monumental realize was his decoration of the grand staircase of the 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. 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.