Théodore Chassériau (1819 - 1856) was a French painter who attained some success in his effort to fuse the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix and the Neoclassicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. As a boy, he entered Ingres’ studio, and followed his master to Rome in 1834. He first exhibited in 1836 at the Paris Salon, where he was awarded a 3rd-place medal in the category of history painting. His immediate success at the Paris Salon of 1836 was confirmed 3 years later by a Venus in the Louvre. Around 1840, however, Chassériau began to grow dissatisfied with Ingres’ art, and about 1843, his subject matter and style began to show the influence of Delacroix who was Ingres’s rival, and he began attempting deliberately to combine some qualities of Ingres with the some methods of the Romantic master.
His 1844 “15 Othello” etchings and his paintings of Jewish and Moorish life following his 1846 trip to North Africa suggest some influence of Delacroix - though he added an exotic quality of his own. Chassériau was very important in the revival of religious and enormous figurative painting in France, though few of those works survive intact. He was a prolific draftsman throughout his life; he executed his many portrait drawings using a finely pointed graphite pencil. He also created a body of 29 prints, including a group of 18 etchings of subjects from Othello (Shakespeare's work) in 1844. After a period of ill health Chassériau died in Paris on October 8, 1856 at the age of 37.
