After studying with Léon Cogniet at the Paris School of Fine Arts, he began to exhibit religious and genre paintings. The revolution of 1848 and his horror at seeing victims lying dead in the streets inspired him to paint La Nuit du 23 février (The Night of 23 February). These events, in which he was wounded, made him aware of the power of turbulent, angry crowds. Sent to convalesce in the Pyrenees, he went on to Madrid, where he was impressed by the work of Velåsquez and, more importantly, Goya, who influenced his work. During this long stay in Spain, he painted a number of oils that showed Spanish life as heroic, sanguine, devout and fanatic. In 1853, Dehodencq discovered Morocco — Tangiers, Tetuan, Mogador, Rabat, Salé. "It nearly drove me out of my senses !" he cried on first seeing this country with which he was to be so passionately involved. From 1854 until his return to France in 1863, he divided his time between Cadiz, with his Spanish wife and children, and Tangiers. During these nine years in North Africa, he made endless, brilliantly executed sketches, frenzied whorls that capture the movement of teeming life in Moroccan streets. He used individual studies of each detail to carefully build up his painted compositions. In many of these, exaggerated gestures ind facial expressions, together with an often repeated trick of figures staring out at the spectator, give a caricatural aspect. Dehodencq's strident and brutal colours, with a heavy use of black, echo the violence of his subjects: L 'Exécution de la Juive (Execution of the Jewess), La Justice du Pacha (The Pasha 's Justice) (Musée Saliés, Bagneres-de-Bigorre), Le Supplice des Voleurs (The Thieves' Punishment), Arrestation d'un Juif å Tanger (Arresting of a Jew in Tangiers) and Bastonnade å la Kasbah (Bastinado in the Casbah).
Dehodencq, like Delacroix and Chassériau, was largely dependent on the Jewish population for his models, particularly in his interior scenes, such as Concert juif chez le caid marocain (Jewish Concert at the home of the Moroccan Chieftain), Noce juive (Jewish Wedding) (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Algiers) and La Féte juive Tanger (Jewish Festival in Tangiers) (Musées de Poitiers, p. 106).
Although the paintings he had sent from Morocco for exhibition at the Paris Salon had been well received, Dehodencq did not know how to exploit this success. After his return to France, he found that his long absence had pushed him to the fringe of current art movements. He continued to paint Orientalist subjects, but even his moving picture of the last king of Granada, Les Adieux de Boabdil (Boabdil's Farewell) (on loan; Musée Municipal des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing), was treated with indifference. He turned to more popular themes, sentimental paintings of children and narrative genre scenes but, in poverty and despair, he committed suicide. Although Dehodencq had no great influence on his contemporaries, he was the first artist to pay more than a short visit to Morocco. Not only that, his drawings are amongst the most remarkable of the nineteeth century. The first people to rediscover and collect his work were Monsieur and Madame Alexandre Popoff, owners of a Paris gallery. Their collection was later sold in various auctions.
Literature: G. Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, histoire d'un coloriste, Paris, 1885; G. Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, 17zomme et I'artiste, Paris, 1910; M. Hammel, "Alfred Dehodencq," Revue de l'Art, Paris, 1910; V. Prat, Alfred Dehodencq (memoir), École du Louvre, Paris, 1977.