DAUZATS, Adrien

(b. 1804 Bordeaux, d. 1868 Paris)

French painter, illustrator, and draftsman. He he studied set painting in his native Bordeaux, then worked in Paris painting sets for the Théâtre Italien. He began working with Baron Taylor in 1827 on Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France. He thus made a large number of architectural paintings and drawings.

Dauzats was one of the first painters to embark on exploratory trips to exotic countries. In 1830, he traveled with Baron Taylor to Egypt, the Sinai, Palestine, and Syria. He went to Spain several times (1835 to 1837), then to Algeria (1839) and Tangiers (1850). Although his orientalist work was free of the constraints inherent in a commission, it essentially consisted of views of monuments with landscapes of varying size, depending on the work.

He was a frequent exhibitor at the Salon of genre subjects and interiors of churches, and was also a lithographer.

He was a friend of Delacroix who asked him to be one of his executors.

Church of Saint-Georges in Haguenau

The church of Saint-Georges in Haguenau (German: Hagenau) is a medieval parish church in Alsace.

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Mosque of Cairo

An inscription on the back of the painting designates this impressive mosque as that of Al-Azhar. Yet the minaret and dome depicted here differ significantly from the architecture of this mosque, still in place in Cairo. The painting, dated 1840 and dedicated by the artist to his friend Lottin Laval would resemble a rather enchanted reconstitution of Egypt that Dauzats had left ten years earlier.

The painting is signed, dated and dedicated lower right: “A. Dauzats. 1840 / a son ami Lottin de Laval.”

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Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria

The expedition of Iron Gates was a military operation of the French army in October 1839 to establish a land link between Algiers and Constantine, through the Bibans Mountains, called “the Gates of iron.”

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The Giralda, Seville

The Giralda once served as the minaret of the mosque of Seville, which was transformed into a cathedral in the thirteenth century. This informal sketch was painted during one of Dauzats’s trips to Spain in the company of Baron Isidore Taylor (1789-1879), who played a crucial role in expanding French popular taste to include works of art from other cultures and scenes of travel abroad.

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