Born 200 years ago today, he should have been one of the major artists of the 19th century, but died when he had only just turned 37.
orientalism
A pupil of JAD Ingres when he was only 11 years old, his first work exhibited at the Salon when he was only 16: a precocious and brilliant narrative artist.
Although intricate in their detail, none of these paintings is larger than 90 cm in either dimension – and several are quite painterly in a miniature way.
A pupil of the great Chassériau, he spent several years touring the Middle East with French diplomatic missions. Here are his paintings.
Those artists who did visit and paint the women of North Africa show very different pictures, here seen in depictions of the Ouled Naïl people.
Paintings of odalisques, slave markets, and Turkish baths became popular in the nineteenth century. What was the Orientalist fantasy, and why?
His style became very Impressionist. Then, when painting outdoors at Portici, Naples, he contracted malaria and died.
A precocious artist, he went from 2 years study in Rome to Morocco, where he was a war artist. There he became an orientalist.
Two notable paintings about slavery, some genre scenes of travel, and a final expedition to South America.
He painted a series of narratives drawn from the Bible and other sources, and 32 watercolours of ‘Passions’ over this period.
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