Photo: Eugene Delacroix' Algerian Women in Their Apartments,1834.

From Delacroix to Matisse: Drawings from the Algiers Museum of Art
 

Photo: Painting of the Tepidarium by Théodore Chassériau,1853. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Algiers Museum of Fine Arts houses a collection of  8,000 works, dating from the 14th to the 20th century,  including a Print Department with nearly 1,750 drawings and engravings. A selection of around 60 French drawings, from the 19th and early 20th centuries, will give the public an  idea of the wealth and diversity of this collection that is little-known in France. On the one hand, the exhibition will present works by “Orientalist” artists such as Chassériau, Decamps, Delacroix and Fromentin, on the other, it will focus on some of the key figures in French drawing: Degas, Derain, Millet, Puvis de Chavannes and Seurat. It will be complemented by a section on the history of the museum and the restoration carried out for the exhibition. Chassériau, Théodore (1819-56). French painter. He was the most gifted pupil of Ingres  whose studio in Rome in entered when he was 11, but in the 1840s he conceived an admiration for Delacroix and attempted, with considerable success, to combine Ingres's classical  linear grace with Delacroix's romantic  color. His chief work was the decoration of the Cour des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay, Paris, with allegorical scenes of Peace and War (1844-48), but these were almost completely destroyed by fire. There are other examples of his decorative work, however, in various churches in Paris. Chassériau was also an outstanding portraitist and painted nudes and North African scenes (he made a visit there in 1846).

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