Louis-François Cassas

Detail of Brest, Penfeld harbour in 1777, by Louis-François Cassas. Louis-François Cassas (June 3, 1756 – November 1, 1827) was a French landscape painter, sculptor, architect, archaeologist and antiquary born at Azay-le-Ferron, in the Indre Department of France. His father was an artisan in the office of the "Ponts et Chaussés", and Cassas followed him there as an apprentice draughtsman when he was only fifteen years old.

Life As the godson of the Marquis Louis-François de Gallifet, owner of the Château d'Azay-le-Ferron, where Cassas was born, his artistic education was very eclectic. He studied in Tours and Paris before traveling to Rome. His teachers included Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a Neo-classical painter and teacher to Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Louis Jean François Lagrenée the younger (1739–1821), as well as Roccoco painters such as Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734–1781). He visited Egypt from October to December 1785, and drew the antiquities of Alexandria, the pyramids of Giza and the mosques of Cairo.

At the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century, the artist had already combined his first observations of Egyptian monuments in a series of paintings which were very influential on many artists and stage designers in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He was appointed as drawing professor and later as General Inspector at the Gobelin Tapestry Manufactory, for contributing to the development of products from this factory.

He died in Versailles of a stroke of apoplexy, on November 1, 1827, invested with several orders of knighthood, including the Légion d'honneur, After his death Cassas was largely forgotten and his work was greatly neglected. In 1973, the government of Yugoslavia paid homage to Cassas issuing a postage stamp of the city of Split from one of his 1782 etchings called Vue de Spalatro et du Lazareth. They were deposited in the Palais de l'Institut and later transferred to Paris's École des Beaux-Arts.

Besides his architectural and archaeological drawings and sketches, he drew numerous costumes studies, views and processions, as well as scenes from daily life, plants and animals of all sorts. He also exhibited views of his travels at the "Salons", which were periodic art exhibitions sponsored by the French Académie Royale, in 1804 and 1814, and published Picturesque views of the Principal Sites and Monuments of Greece, of Sicily, and of the Seven Hills of Rome, of which thirty parts had already been published by 1813.