Getty Museum
Portrait of Raymond de Magnoncourt
Creator
Théodore ChassériauFrench Artist · 1819–1856
All works by this person →"This child will be the Napoleon of painting," Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres predicted about the prodigy who entered his studio at age eleven. Before he was seventeen, Théodore Chassériau won a third-class medal at the Salon. His early female nudes combined his characteristic sensuality with Ingres's idealizing style. In 1840 Chassériau joined Ingres in Rome. Increasingly critical of the academic
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1851
- Medium
- Pencil heightened with white chalk
- Culture
- French
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
An elegant young man with large, liquid eyes reclines languidly on a large cushion, pausing to look up from his reading. Raymond Henri de Staal de Magnoncourt, elder son of the Comte de Magnoncourt, was about sixteen years old when this drawing was made and dedicated to his mother in the bottom corner. His dreamy expression, rumpled yet elegant clothes, tousled hair, and the overall ambiance of artistic beauty and inspiration vividly capture the essence of the Romantic period. Théodore Chassériau brought a sense of poetry and emotion to his portraiture. He used delicate, almost imperceptible lines to create the sitter's face and hands. Soft shading shapes the boy's round cheek, squashed up under his eye as he rests his head on his hand. In contrast, Chassériau drew the boy's clothing with dark, strong lines, clearly emphasizing the precise, elegant hatching that creates the fabric's shadows and folds.
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