Alfred Chataud Marseilles (1833 - 1908)

Alfred Chataud was one of the first painters to settle in Algeria, and although he died virtually unknown, he sowed the seeds of the artistic movement which was to become the School of Algiers in the 1920s. Chataud was the son of a banker, and his family intended for him to work in an insurance company; he even spent a period in training at La Nationale in Paris. He soon gave up the security of this future career and returned to Marseilles in 1857 to take lessons from Emile Loubon, who taught generations of Provencal painters. Back in Paris, he studied under Charles Gleyre and frequently visited the artists Paul Guigou and Adolphe Monticelli, both from the South of France. In 1856, Chataud made his first journey to Algeria, where his family had property. From then on, he made short stays in Algiers and the region of Böne, spending his winters in Paris and returning to North Africa at the beginning of summer. He went as far as Tunisia and Morocco on some of these journeys. Although he painted landscapes around Mantes (where he lived for seven years), Fontainebleau and the outskirts of Paris, the paintings he sent to the Salons both in Paris and Marseilles were almost exclusively of Algerian subjects. Inspired by the melodramatic pictures of Henri Regnault (he made a copy in 1873 of Regnault's second-year painting submitted from the Academy of France in Rome, Judith et Holopherne (Judith and Holophernes), he painted scenes of a fantasy Orient, such as Farniente (Farniente) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Constantine), L'Eunuque endormi (Sleeping Eunuch) and Un drame dans le sérail (Incident in a Seraglio) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles), taken from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes. He soon abandoned this style, but was still interested in groups of figures, as can be seen from the picture illustrated on page 127 and Musiciens nigres Alger (Negro Musicians in Algiers) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles). In 1892, Chataud was called to Algiers to settle a lawsuit over some property and decided to remain on a small family estate near Sidi Moussa. While he sent fewer and fewer paintings for exhibition in Paris, he was active in the creation in 1897 of the most important of the Algerian Salons, the Société des Artistes Algériens et Orientalistes, of which he became vice président in 1904.