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for AUGUSTE RAFFET
AUGUSTE RAFFET
1804 - 1860
(b Paris, 1 March 1804; d Genoa, 16 Feb 1860).
French lithographer, painter and illustrator. On 11 October 1824, Raffet was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he spent five years in Charlet's atelier. Following this, in 1829 he became a pupil of Antoine-Jean Gros. While at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Raffet prepared himself for the Prix de Rome competition by painting various classical subjects. However, he tried and failed the competition in 1831, and this led him to abandon classical subjects and to devote himself to contemporary history subjects. Though continuing to produce a few paintings, he began to concentrate on drawing, lithography and illustration. Raffet revolutionized the representation of battle scenes. Both his paintings (e.g. Episode from the Retreat from Russia, 1856; Paris, Louvre) and his prints form a glorifying and often humorous chronicle of French political history from the Revolution to the culmination of the Second Empire, the battle of Solferino of 1859.
The third period (from 1837) is one of observation. In 1837 Raffet visited Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, the Crimea, Smyrna and Constantinople, during which he met Prince Anatole Demidov, who became his principal patron. Raffet produced numerous, highly accurate ethnographic drawings, which he subsequently lithographed and published in Paris. The most important of these are the hundred lithographs that appeared under the title Voyage dans la Russie méridionale et la Crimée par la Hongrie, la Valachie et la Moldavie (4 vols), published in Paris in 1857. He continued to travel with Demidov until the end of his life (e.g. to Spain in 1847) and participated in the French campaign in Italy (1859), an experience that resulted in such lithographs as the Siege of Rome.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bénézit
A. Bry: Raffet: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1861)
H. Giacomelli: Raffet: Son oeuvre lithographique et ses eaux-forts (Paris, 1862)
H. Beraldi: Raffet: Peintre national (Paris, c. 1890)
--: Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, xi (Paris, 1891), pp. 61-149
A. Curtis: Auguste Raffet (New York, 1903)
R. J. Wickenden: 'Auguste Raffet (1804-1860)', Prt Colr Q. (1917), pp. 25-54
P. Ladoué: Raffet (Paris, 1946)
The Charged Image: French Lithographic Caricature, 1816-1848 (exh. cat. by B. Farwell, Santa Barbara, U. CA, A. Mus., 1989)
ATHENA S. E. LEOUSSI
© Oxford University Press 2007
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