Retrospective introduces obscure French success

Vaguely warm expressions of elegant French upper-class men and women contrast with the Middle Eastern scenes of people in flowing robes, splashes of color defining their contours.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective, “Theodore Chasseriau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic,” introduces the works of a talented French artist who achieved meteoric success and controversy during his time yet whose works fell into obscurity afterward.

His only previous retrospective was in 1933 in Paris.

Born in 1819 in Samana, Dominican Republic, to a French diplomat father and the French-Creole daughter of planters, he moved with his family to Paris when he was 2. At 12, he entered the studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a master of Neo-Classicism.

Four years later, his work was accepted by the annual Paris Salon. Through his brother’s government connections, he won state and church commissions and painted and drew numerous portraits of members of the elite circles in which he easily moved. Physically delicate, he died at the age of 37 from fatigue.

Critics during his time often unfavorably compared him to Ingres, known for his strong lines, and to the romantic Eugene Delacroix -- a proponent of strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness.

Some of Chasseriau’s works were considered unoriginal and the indecisive outcomes of these two influences.

But these criticisms do not seem to matter when examining his commanding portraits -- 126 works arranged chronologically and thematically in the show.

Facing the entrance to the exhibit is the “The Two Sisters” from 1843. It is “extraordinarily graceful with broad expanse of colors,” says Gary Tinterow, curator of the exhibit, noting the deep red of the identical huge shawls and the green wall behind the artist’s sisters, Adele and Aline.

Another important work among his early portraits is the “Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg” (1841), a recent and important acquisition for the Met. The painting has not been seen since the 1933 retrospective.

According to Tinterow, Chasseriau beat out Ingres for the commission to do the portrait of the wife of the French ambassador in Rome. The pink folds of the subject’s dress, along with “The Two Sisters” shawls, approach the vividness of the hypnotic blue dress of Ingres’ “Princesse de Broglie” and the gold chair on which the princess leans.

There is a flatness to the Maubourg painting. A more vibrant, warmer image is “Marie-Therese de Cabarus” (1848). The subject is shown in pink gown and matching shawl and tiara of pink flowers; she carries a bouquet of small blue flowers.

As with most of Chasseriau’s portrait drawings and paintings, the subjects are delicate-looking, though their arms are fleshy, with oval-shaped faces, very expressive, elongated eyes and rather gauzy chins.

Although he continued with traditional styles of painting, Chasseriau also painted with the lush colors of the romantics.

Chasseriau visited Algeria in 1846, influenced by Delacroix, who set the trend for other painters by first going there. Later he produced scenes of marketplaces, imagined harems and battles, characterized by much energy, color and impressionistic lines.

In “Moorish Dancers,” from 1849, two women, one in a red and gold dress and the other in blue, pace in the center of the painting, holding fabric in each hand and surrounded by male and female spectators. Lines only suggest facial contours, dress folds and designs and rug patterns and shapes, but the effect is pleasing.

The retrospective was organized by the Met, the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, the Louvre Museum and the Museums of Strasbourg. Accompanied by a thick catalog, the show remains on view through Jan. 5 and will not travel.