Head of a Mustachioed Man, Three-Quarter View

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Artist: Anne-Louis Girodet (French, 1767–1824)
Medium: Charcoal, black and white chalk, with stumping on beige paper
Size: 7 5/8 x 7 1/4 in. (19.4 x 18.4 cm) (image, irregular)
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Rights: Public Domain Mark

While this head study was likely drawn from life, the figure’s mustache distances him from the everyday world of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Paris. The drawing can be associated with the artist’s so-called Oriental heads or portraits—a group of late works picturing men from the Near East. Both real and imagined, these subjects usually have dark, thick facial hair, turbans, and, as one Girodet scholar observed, “a heavy, impenetrable gaze as though this disturbing inscrutability were a specific trait of the Oriental portrait.”

Following Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, interest in the eastern Mediterranean surged in France. For Girodet, the lure only intensified when he began his monumental painting Revolt of Cairo (1810), commissioned by Napoleon. One pupil reported that Girodet worked with unprecedented verve and assurance, writing that “his mood was playful, he was surrounded by Mamelukes, who were practically living in his house and whose beauty electrified him.”

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.