"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
