Charles-Theodore Frere

Charles-Theodore Frere, referred to familiarly as Theodore, was born in Paris on June 24, 1814. He was the older brother of Pierre-Édouard Frere, an established genre painter who had studied under Paul Delaroche. The fraternity of the two brother-artists, both attaining such a high level of prestige, was unique in that they treated extremely different themes.

Theodore began studying under Jean-Leon Cogniet and Camille Roqueplan. Shortly after beginning his studies, he left Paris and traveled through the countryside of Normandy, Alsace, and Auvergne, finding inspiration in nature.

After returning to Paris, Frere used what he had seen in painting his first composition, accepted at the Salon of 1834 and titled Vue des Environs de Strasbourg, a city located in the Alsace region of France. Alongside this work, he also showed a landscape painting based on views of the Brie-Comte-Robert area. His earliest compositions, those exhibited until the Salon of 1836, concentrated on scenes that were available and familiar to him, and also well-known to Salon audiences. But Frere was interested in more than depictions of his home country, and sometime between 1836 and 1838, Frere departed on his first journey to Algeria. Visions of the Algerian landscape and people would be present in nearly every one of the works he exhibited at the Salon until 1850.

Frere began contributing to the movement known as Orientalism, the depiction of cultures from the near and far East, highlighting their cultural practices, daily life, architecture, and brilliant sunlight with an uninhibited sense of veracity, or what may be termed as "ethnography." He became intrigued by these cultures. After his journey to Algeria, which lasted roughly from 1836 or 1837 to 1839, he returned to Paris, but later traveled through Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Syria, presumably beginning sometime around 1851 through 1854. He spent several years in Egypt especially, traveling down the Nile numerous times, and eventually establishing his own studio in Cairo. From 1855, he began to exhibit only Oriental themes at the Salon, including landscapes, cityscapes, and interiors, continuing to do so for the next three decades.

These extensive journeys furnished him with a mass of images from which to draw on. These Orientalist themes were not only popular with artists, but also with collectors, the public and most notably, the government, which felt that by encouraging French artists to travel abroad, they were communicating to the public the strength of the French state and their colonial domination. During Frere's first trip to Algeria, he produced several large paintings for the king of Württemberg.

In 1841, he sent two paintings to the Paris Salon, which were later purchased by Louis-Phillipe, a power-seeking individual who would have certainly felt a fondness for images that portrayed France's cultural and colonial domination over another culture. In a sense, Frere, while painting images that he had an extreme interest in, was also making a political statement, perhaps unintentionally, which increased the public's knowledge and interest in further colonial expansion.

Frere continued exhibiting work at the Salon with great success throughout his life. In 1869, he made his final visit to the eastern Mediterranean, traveling in the party of the Empress Eugénie during her voyage to the Orient, executing, by her order, an album of watercolors. By the end of his career his oeuvre had expanded to include paintings executed after nature, landscapes, interiors, scenes of daily life, each Oriental in style. He received a second-class medal in 1848 when he exhibited an astonishing twelve works, and a first-class award in 1865 for Café de Galata à Constantinople, and L'Île de Philoe - Nubia.

Throughout his life he would have an extraordinary number of works accepted into the Salon, showing that he was not only a prolific painter, but that his works were very much admired by Salon jurors eager to represent this new Orientalism craze at the Salon. He also became an Officier de l'Ordre du Medjidieh de Turquie and a member of the Société des Artistes Français. He continued exhibiting regularly at the Salon until 1887. He died on March 24, 1888.