Auguste Raffet

Auguste Raffet studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris and Académie Suisse. Training under Antoine-Jean Gros and Nicolas Toussaint Charlet is recorded. Jules Dupré is recorded as having studied under Auguste Raffet. The recorded working language is French. Employment is recorded with Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. Work by Auguste Raffet is recorded in the collections of Nationalmuseum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Auckland Art Gallery.

Raffet was born in Paris. At an early age he was apprenticed to a wood turner, but took up the study of art at evening classes. At the age of 18 he entered the workshop of Cabanel, where he applied his skill to the decoration of china, and where he met Rudor, from whom he received instruction in lithography, in the practice of which he was to rise to fame. He then entered the École des Beaux-Arts, but returned to lithography in 1830 when he produced on stone his famous designs of Lützen, Waterloo, Le bal, La revue, and Les adieux de la garrison, by which his reputation became immediately established. Raffet's chief works were his lithographs of the Napoleonic campaigns, from Egypt to Waterloo, vigorous designs inspired by ardent patriotic enthusiasm. In this endeavour he was a contemporary of other French artist-lithographers of Napoleon and the French army including Hippolyte Bellangé, Horace Vernet, and Nicolas Toussaint Charlet. As an illustrator his activity was prodigious, the list of works illustrated by his crayon amounting to about forty-five, among which are Béranger's poems, the History of the Revolution by Adolphe Thiers, the History of Napoleon by de Norvins, the great Walter Scott by Auguste Defauconpret, the French Plutarch and Frédéric Bérat's Songs. He went to Rome in 1849, was present at the siege of Rome, which he made the subject of some lithographs, and followed the Italian campaign of 1859, of which he left a record in his Episodes de la campagne d'Italie de 1859. His portraits in pencil and water-colour are full of character. He died at Genoa in 1860. In 1893 a monument by Emmanuel Frémiet was unveiled in the Jardin de l'Infante at the Louvre, Paris. The statue was removed and melted down during the nazi occupation of Paris.

• Anatolīĭ Demidov (principe di San Donato), André Durand, Denis Auguste Marie Raffet: Voyage pittoresque et archéologique en Russie par le Hâvre, Hambourg, Lubeck, Saint-Petersbourg, Moscou, Nijni-Novgorod, Yaroslaw et Kasan, exécutée en 1839 sous la direction de M. Anatole de Démidoff. Paris, Gihaut frères, [1840–1848] • Marquet de Montbreton de Norvins, Jacques, Baron – Histoire de Napoleon. – Paris, 1827–28 – 4 vols. Illustrated by Raffet and Vernet.