Theodore Chasseriau: The Unknown Romantic (Metropolitan Museum of Art) [Hardcover]

As a boy prodigy of 11 years old Theodore Chasseriau was admitted as an apprentice to the studio of Jean Ingres, a giant of nineteenth century French painting. Once a young man, he began a meteoric art career before an unexpected death at 37 from illness. Chasseriau has been scornfully dismissed by French art critics for a style that drifted between mimicry of his master Ingres (a photo realist of his day), towards resemblance to the art of Eugene Delacroix (a Romantic with a loose and fluid style). This book helps rehabilitate Chasseriau's name based on a complete picture of his output that demonstrates an artist with his own unique style and compositions.

Chasseriau's greatest success came in his mid 20s with a commission to paint 270 square metres of murals for the grand staircase leading to the Court of Audit in the Palais d'Orsay (later burnt down, and today the art museum The Musee d'Orsay). Surviving and rehabilitated fragments of this work are reproduced in this book, but I do not think these remnants are the real centrepiece of Chasseriau's legacy. More significant was his stay in Algiers which unleashed experimentation with paintings of Eastern themes including Arabic battle scenes, Moorish dancers, Jewish families and fleshy harem beauties. These lively paintings are the real drawcard in this book.

Chasseriau's exotic females were distinct: sensual, elongated and confident. One biographer wrote boldly that he "had the privilege of endowing the world of art with a female type whose physique and physiognomy had not existed before him." His shimmering colours and stylised realism all attest to an artist that sought to put emotion into his work. In his words he strived to put "poetry in reality."

The guts of this book is the catalogue of 256 paintings and sketches assembled for an exhibition at three venues, including in France and in New York. Each image is reproduced in colour and some are also supported by close-ups. Each artwork enjoys a short description, including background on the sitters for the formal society portraits (a staple of the artist's income in his early years). A strength of this book is its display of numerous compositional sketches, tonal drawings and colour roughs that were used to plan subsequent canvases. These help to show the artist's working methods and are very attractive artworks in their own right. My one quibble is that some of the fine pencil sketches are printed too small to adequately bring up the detail.

Written and researched by a cavalcade of historians from art museums, this book sometimes lumbers under the weight of meandering history about the art circles and movements of the era. This is the heavy style of publisher Yale University Press, the pre-eminent organ of art history writing in the English speaking world. Fortunately in this book, the text does not cramp out the abundance of dazzling art. The biographical chapters on Chasseriau are very readable, more so than the thematic essays that are inexplicitly jammed up front ahead of the visual and biographical survey.

This book does vindicate Chasseriau as an author of some stunning artworks. But it is also true that he shows the heavy imprint of influence by other masters (as argued by his critics). His portraits are alike Ingres's portraits, including the preparatory pencil works. His later paintings do have the broad brushwork style of the melodramatic painter Delacroix and the comedic artist Daumier. But Chasseriau's work is far less dark than either of these contemporaries. His uplifting compositions seek to find and extol the beauty in this world and in my view that is his unique contribution which marks his place in art history.

This book does justice to Chasseriau's reputation and is a great collectible for admirers of Orientalist, Romantic or Symbolist art. This is an abridged version of my review from Art Book News at blogspot.

Book specs:
432 pages, 12.3 x 9.5 inches, 326 illustrations (267 colour)

I stumbled across this book during one of my many AMAZON searches for interesting art books about a month ago. After reading the book description, and finding out that Chasseriau was a student of Ingres', I knew that I had to take a chance and purchase this book. " Well Worth It" is an understatement. Chasseriau crosses over into several different art movements of his day yet still remains very true to his own unique personal artistic expression. In some of his work it is hard to tell it apart from Ingres masterfully drafted works. He is also linked to the French Romantics, covering subjects from the early 19th cen. middle east. I have not had a chance to read the text, but I can hardly wait. I am sure it will be interesting to learn more about this artist and what were the personal motivations for his work.

I was surprise by the quality of the state of the book, and the delivery is absolutely a must.