Auguste Raffet
French, 1804 - 1860
French lithographer, painter and illustrator. Following the assassination of his father in 1813, the lack of family resources obliged Raffet to work while still a child. He was apprenticed to a wood-turner and attended drawing lessons in the evenings. At the age of 18 he spent a short period as an apprentice porcelain decorator for which he showed remarkable painting skills, and he then began his training as a painter by attending the classes of Charles Alexandre Suisse. There he was befriended by three fellow students who were also pupils of the military artist Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet. Among them was Louis Henri de Rudder (1807–81), who in 1824 introduced Raffet to Charlet. Six months later, 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.
Raffet’s oeuvre as a lithographer and illustrator can be divided into three main periods. The first period, while he was still a student, was one of imitation. Having been taught the techniques of lithography by de Rudder, between 1824 and 1830 he produced albums containing lithographs such as Vive la République! and Mon Empereur, c’est la plus cuite. During this period he primarily copied the style of Horace Vernet but also that of Charlet and of Hippolyte Bellangé. In the second period (1830–37) Raffet improvised and began to develop a personal style. His imaginative powers are evident in the depiction of those events that he had not actually seen, as was the case for the lithograph The Battle of Oued-Allez. Drawn from the Algerian expedition, this work, often considered his masterpiece, typifies Raffet’s style. It shows his emphasis on the French soldiers, whom he placed in the foreground of the battle scene; his rejection of Neo-classicism in favour of a concern with depicting real types and manners; and his ability to suggest wide spaces and large numbers on a small scale. He also produced numerous illustrations for such books as Adolphe Thiers’s Histoire de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1837).
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.
Athena S. E. Leoussi. "Raffet, Auguste." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T070561 (accessed March 7, 2012).
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