André Castaigne

Jean Alexandre Michel André Castaigne – 1929, in Angoulême) was a French artist and engraver, a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. Subsequently he became a leading illustrator in the United States. He is often recalled as the original illustrator of the first edition of The Phantom of the Opera.

Castaigne also created more than 36 art pieces about Alexander the Great for an 1898–99 series. As an illustrator, he captured images of the first modern olympics; he drew pictures of the 1896 Olympic Games for Scribner's Magazine.

Biography André Castaigne was the son of Jean Eusèbe Joseph Castaigne (1828–1902), himself a painter, and Mathilde Debouchaud. His brother Joseph Jean Destrains Castaigne (1859–1923) was a poet. After a few months he transferred to the Académie des Beaux-Arts where his two mentors taught. He was in Cabanel's studio for a year before moving to Gérôme's studio where he won first place in the General Competition three times–for nude figure painting, composition, and general excellence. These images of the West earned him immediate recognition as a master of a very American art form. and made trips to the US from time to time to do American illustrations for the magazine. These include Mammouth Cave (1898) and Niagara Falls (1899) a novel dealing with the art life of Paris and illustrated by himself.

He died unmarried in 1929 at the Clinique St. Marthe in Angoulême where he had been admitted with a hernia. Due to complications as a result of not obeying medical orders and getting out of bed, this proved fatal.