Chasseriau, in paint and in print: an ambitious and prolific painter until his death at 37, Theodore Chasseriau became a footnote to the history of 19th-century Orientalism. A Franco-American retrospective, the first in almost 70 years, brought the wider range of his work back into view

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Todd Porterfield

Among the three exhibition venues, in drawings and in paintings, the entire nuclear family came to be represented. In an early Ingresque painting (ca. 1835-36), younger brother Ernest is seen in the uniform of the French naval academy, the military branch most engaged in French colonial ventures, which was for many Chasseriau men the family business. For the two sisters, Adele and Aline, Chasseriau reserved one of his finest and most transfixing portraits (1843), painting them like impassive twin sphinxes, improbably alike despite the 12 years that separated them. The sisters had sought to ensure Theodore's religious formation, and, according to an ex-lover of the artist, he had "almost a cult" for them, to the point that the catalogue declares their relationship "nearly incestuous." (12) Completed when the artist was but 23, the double portrait marks the culmination of his early family portraits.

In addition to showing Chasseriau as an accomplished portraitist, the exhibition made a strong case for interiority as a hallmark of Chasseriau's oeuvre. Like his Romantic colleagues who turned away from contemporary subjects, Chasseriau drew from the store of mythical and Biblical female protagonists (Andromeda, Diana, Susanna). His heroines are often victims, however, and are given a disturbing twist. Faced with violence and possession, they seem frozen, with delicate gestures and mesmerizing expressions. In Susanna and the Elders, an ambitious entry in the Salon of 1839, Susanna wades into a pool, unaware of two leering voyeurs. She clutches transparent drapery and turns in upon herself, as if pressed down by the shaded thicket behind her. When closely viewed at the Grand Palais, as it cannot be in its usual place at the Louvre, the painting appeared yet more lugubrious, revealing Goyaesque shadows, a vein in Susanna's exposed nipple and, hauntingly, a pentimento of her arm lurking beneath the surface.

In Diana Surprised by Actaeon (1840), shadows cast by gloomy twilight illumination divide the figure groups, yet a conflated middle ground seems to draw the same groups dreamily together. Irrational space, strange gestures and weirdly repeating physiognomies weigh on this conjunction of sex and death. Actaeon, having spied Diana at the bath, will be torn to shreds by his dogs. Here and elsewhere, Chasseriau's pictures are full of foreboding, as dire consequences result from delectation of the female body--the very same delectatioon solicited from the viewers

Interiority merged as well with the mid-19th century's religious revival. The Enlightenment had denigrated religion, and the French Revolution banned Christianity altogether. After the Revolution had ebbed, Napoleon rehabilitated religion in order to secure and extend his own power. While later 19th-century political leaders cultivated Christianity as a safe and congenially unproductive expenditure of time and energy, some Romantic artists pursued religious sentiment as a free space for personal autonomy and creativity.