Untitled (Illustration for Shakespeare’s Richard III), 19th century

Alexandre Bida Select Museum Collections: The British Museum, The Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morgan Library & Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Walters Art Museum

AskArt Bio:
Alexandre BIDA (Toulouse, 1813 - Bühl, 1895)
Regarded in his day as one of the finest draughtsmen of the 19th century, Alexandre Bida abandoned a career as a teacher of classics to study with Eugène Delacroix in Paris. It was the influence of Delacroix, as well as the work of Gabriel-Alexandre Decamps and Auguste Raffet, that led Bida to be interested in Orientalist* themes and subjects.

An early visit to Syria and Constantinople instilled in him a fascination with Near Eastern subjects, and at his Salon debut in 1847 he showed two highly finished drawings of A Cafe in Constantinople and A Cafe on the Bosphorus; both works were purchased by the State.

Bida visited Egypt in 1850, and Greece, Turkey and the Crimea in 1855, and continued to exhibit regularly at the Paris Salons*, showing almost nothing but finished drawings. In a letter of 1870, the painter Eugène Fromentin praised Bida’s draughtsmanship, noting that ‘his drawings are paintings without colour or engravings that did not pass under the burin, but have the same value and weight.’

Bida also undertook a number of projects for book illustrations, notably a series of the collected works of Molière in 1860 and of Alfred de Musset in 1865, as well as an extensively illustrated Bible published by Hachette in 1875. He was also a prolific lithographer.

Large groups of drawings by the artist are today in the Louvre and the museum at Pontoise.