Théodore CHASSERIAU

This powerful late drawing is a preparatory study for the head of the woman kneeling behind the Virgin in Théodore Chassériau’s The Descent from the Cross, painted between 1852 and 1855 in the apse of the Parisian church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. Commissioned from Chassériau in February 1852 by the Ministry of the Interior, The Descent from the Cross was planned as a large mural hemicycle composition. A finished maquette for the work is in Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris at the Petit Palais in Paris, while an early preparatory oil sketch for the composition is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Several preparatory drawings by Chassériau for other figures in this monumental hemicycle composition are known. The present sheet may also have served as a study for the head of the Virgin in Chasseriau’s easel picture of The Adoration of the Magi, signed and dated 1856, which is today also in the collection of the Petit Palais.

The present sheet is known in two autograph versions, although the other drawn version of this head is less finished and shows much less of the sitter’s clothing. As Louis-Antoine Prat has noted, it is rare to find two drawings by Chassériau of the same subject or sitter, and only six or seven examples are known, including portrait drawings of the artist’s brother Ernest and his favourite model Marie Cantacuzène. 

As the 19th century writer and art critic Théophile Gautier noted of the women in the artist’s paintings, ‘The only modern aspect of Chassériau’s heads are the eyes, imbued with a dreamy fixity or drowned in a nostalgic languor…these figures, with their dull serenity and disdainful passivity, are reminiscent of the beautiful Greek slaves captive at the court of some barbarian king…’ While the model for the present sheet was previously identified as one of Chassériau’s two sisters Adèle or Aline, it is more likely to have been his close friend and muse, Marie Cantacuzène (1820-1898), a Romanian princess whom the artist first met around 1854 or 1855, when he lived near her on the Avenue Frochot in Paris. Born Maria Cantacuzino in 1820 in Horodnitzeni in Moldavia, she had arrived in Paris in 1850, and was estranged from her second husband, Prince Alexander Kantakuzen (from the Russian branch of her family), whom she had married in 1839. Gallicizing her name, she settled happily in Paris, despite the strong disapproval of her family in Romania. 

Princess Marie Cantacuzène was to model for a number of Chassériau’s paintings. The artist’s great biographer, Léonce Bénédite, noted that ‘the feeling which Chassériau might have had for Princess Cantacuzène had no resemblance to those which he had for other women…The princess is not a beautiful woman, but she has a very interesting physiognomy with her heavy hair arranged in bandeaux nodules, her lovely sweet and serious eyes, her small fresh and lovely mouth, her elongated and thin face, her pensive air, the distinction of her whole figure and her slightly melancholic grace. What Chassériau found in her… and what explains his true adoration, is a soul.’ It was through Chassériau that, in 1856, Marie Cantacuzène met the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The two were to become lifetime companions, eventually marrying in 1897, when both were in their seventies. As she had with Chassériau, Marie Cantacuzène posed often for figures in paintings by Puvis de Chavannes.