| Original Artist | Eduard Charlemont |
|---|---|
| Code# | 11001 |
| Available in | Medium Quality High Quality |
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Eduard Charlemont
(1842 Vienna, Austria - 1904 Vienna, Austria)
Eduard Charlemont (“shar-luh-mahn”) was born in 1848 in Vienna, the capital of Austria. His father was a professional artist who painted miniature portraits and encouraged his talented son to help. When he was just fifteen, Eduard was hired to teach drawing at a girls’ school. Later he studied at the Vienna Academy, worked as an apprentice in an artist’s studio, and traveled to Germany, Italy, and finally to Paris, where he stayed for thirty years.
In Paris, Charlemont’s paintings were in great demand among wealthy patrons. He won several prizes at the Paris Salons, annual government-sponsored exhibitions held by the French Academy. At the same time, a diverse group of artists who called themselves “the Independents” were organizing their own exhibitions, rebelling against the Academy’s tight control over what kinds of paintings could be exhibited publicly. The Independents included such painters as Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, and soon became known as the Impressionists. Although Impressionist art is very popular today, it was shocking to the Paris art world in the 1870s.
In The Moorish Chief, Charlemont used quite different painting methods than those of the Impressionists. Charlemont painted indoors in his studio, observing in great detail his model and all the other elements that would appear in the picture. His goal was to use his imagination to invent a beautiful and mysterious world. The Impressionists felt that they were simply recording what they saw in the real world. And while Charlemont was highly skilled at blending and hiding his brushstrokes, the Impressionists delighted in allowing theirs to show.
Charlemont’s artistic skill brought him much recognition within his lifetime. While The Moorish Chief and other paintings were meant to be framed, Charlemont was also famous for murals, or large paintings made to cover a wall or ceiling. His masterwork was three enormous panels for Vienna's city theater. Each panel was almost sixty feet long!
Eduard Charlemont died in Vienna in 1906. Today his name is almost unknown, and yet The Moorish Chief is one of the most popular paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; more reproductions of this painting are sold in the Museum Store than of any other work of art in the Museum.
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