Portrait of Jules Monnerot

Delicately rendering the face of a friend with tightly controlled pencil marks, Théodore Chassériau revealed the influence of his teacher, the academic painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who produced intimate pencil portraits in a similar style. Chassériau was, however, also an admirer of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose expressive manner can be detected in the loose, tumbling lines of Monnerot’s wrinkled coat.

The artist was born in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to a French father and a creole mother from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).